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Food as Medicine: And the Memories We Eat

Every day, my mother watches YouTube videos about traditional medicine, nutrition, and staying fit. Almost every day, she discovers something new. Sometimes it is a new ingredient. Sometimes it is a new way to prepare something we have eaten all our lives. And sometimes, it is an instruction that finds its way straight into my kitchen. Recently, it was moringa. We had to mix moringa into the flour before kneading. Other times, it was jowar. The form might change, but the message stayed the same: we could always add something more to our food to make it healthier. She then wonders why her grandparents and parents never told them about the nutritional value of what they ate. Perhaps they did not know these things in the language we use today. Or perhaps they understood food differently. Today, YouTube has become her teacher. It tells her what to eat, what to avoid, what to add to our flour, and what our bodies might be missing. Every new video seems to reveal another secret to good healt...
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The Patient Who Asked Too Many Questions: How AI Is Changing the Conversation in Medicine

HEALTHCARE · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE · PATIENT EXPERIENCE Years ago, at a government hospital, I heard a surgeon say about a patient who kept asking him questions, "She must be a teacher." He was half-joking. She turned out to be one. It became my private joke: anyone who asks that many questions must be a teacher. I didn't know I'd think of that remark again. I think of it now because the patient who asks too many questions is no longer rare. She is in my family. Perhaps you have encountered her, too.   A new kind of conversation My mother, my uncles, and my aunts are not medical professionals. When an unfamiliar symptom appears, they don't know the terminology, the likely causes, or the right questions to ask. But they have found ChatGPT and Gemini, and they talk to them like buddies. A symptom prompts a question, an answer prompts another, and nobody waits. Voice input matters most. They don't have to type a carefully worded query or know the medical term. ...
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A Quiet Corner: Notes from a Desk at 30,000 Reads

A message to all my readers  When I first began writing down my stories in this quiet space, it was nothing more than an open diary. A place to put memories that needed somewhere to rest, reflections gathered over a lifetime, and thoughts that felt too personal—or perhaps simply too ordinary—to share in conversation. Conventional wisdom often suggests that personal musings rarely accomplish much on the wider internet. There are no frameworks here, no quick advice, and no polished agendas. Just the raw textures of life as I have experienced it: the sudden turns, the quiet routines, the moments of doubt, and the steady work of beginning again. Recently, as a small corner quietly crossed 30,000 reads, I paused to look more closely at the numbers. What moved me was not just the milestone itself, but where those visits were coming from. While some readers join from home here in India, so many of you are reading from entirely different corners of the earth—from Singapore across the seas ...
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When You Don't Fit into One Box

I've been told my path looks scattered: first clinical dentistry, then a hospital, then annotating X-rays for machine learning, then making videos, then writing about it all. For years, career advice said the same thing: find your niche, become an expert, and build your career around it. But AI is changing the economics of specialization. I researched, drafted, and revised a piece that might once have needed a subject expert, a writer, and an editor. Not because I got smarter overnight but because the tools closed the gap between knowing a field and doing useful work in it. Versatility gets read as unfocused in a world obsessed with specialization. Pick one thing and master it; it is the rule. But when one person can now work across areas that once belonged to different roles and move across fields, versatility becomes a strength. The skill lies in connecting knowledge, tools, and perspectives to solve a problem. The tools will keep changing. The next one may not even...
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From Ram Ram to Ctrl+V: A Spiritual Upgrade

Turns out retirement comes with a starter kit. Not gold watches anymore — diaries and pens. Apparently, the universal assumption is that the moment you stop clocking in, you'll develop an urgent need to journal your feelings in cursive. When my mother retired, her students gave her a diary and a pen with the quiet confidence of people gifting a fire extinguisher, "just in case you combust with free time." As I hit the official Indian retirement number, the one they print on forms. I made the mistake of telling my mother I didn't know what to do with myself now. Her face lit up with the joy mothers reserve for recycling old material on children. "I'll give you a diary," she said. "Just write Ram Ram." Repeatedly. Page after page. Instant purpose, zero creativity required, and technically religious practice. I laughed and told her I wasn't going to write anything like that. I was going to copy and paste it on the computer. She didn't even...
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The Night of the Rain

  It was one of those nights when the rain seemed determined to wash the whole town away. Sheets of water hammered against the windows, the roads were nearly deserted, and most people were asleep behind locked doors. My husband was resting lightly, as doctors often do when they know the doorbell might ring at any moment. Sometime past midnight, the bell rang. The emergency night staff called him downstairs. “Doctor, there’s a patient.” When he reached the entrance, he saw two young boys standing at the gate of the clinic porch. The smell of alcohol hung thick in the air. One of them was struggling to keep the other upright. The injured boy was slumped against him, barely conscious, his weight hanging heavily on his friend’s shoulder. “What happened?” my husband asked. The friend spoke with urgency. They had slipped from the motorbike. Even in that brief moment, my husband could tell the injury was serious. Head injury. Possible internal bleeding. It was the kind of case that needed...
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I was a dentist for 30 years. At 57, I started over, and my biggest asset wasn't experience

I made a decision that didn't sound ambitious on paper: I chose to stay home and care for my mother. It was also the moment my professional identity began to unravel with no obvious next step. In my family, a postgraduate degree was less a distinction than a baseline expectation. So, I did what I was supposed to do.  I had practiced and built a career. For nearly three decades, I remained a dentist doing routine work. What I had, at that point, was a blog. A small one. Hosted on Blogger. Read generously by friends and family and diplomatically described by others as "promising," which, in adult language, means not quite there yet. I decided to bet on it anyway. The Pivot The job market was not kind and certainly not to late beginners. AI had just begun, and then there was me. A dentist. With a blog. And an unreasonable amount of determination to prove. I enrolled in a digital marketing course, less a course and more a controlled demolition of my comfort zone. I was into a...
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