Newerways

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...

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...

  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...

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...

There was a time when falling sick meant one thing: going to a doctor, waiting endlessly, nodding seriously at things you didn’t understand, and paying a bill that made your fever come back. What eventually worked was my grandmother’s advice and her kitchen armamentarium. Then came AI. Suddenly, healthcare was no longer confined to clinics and prescriptions. It was in our pockets. A strange, powerful moment in history where a person with a sore throat, mild anxiety, and questionable internet habits could confidently self-diagnose five rare conditions before breakfast. It started with a mild headache. Instead of resting like a normal human, I did what any modern, enlightened individual would do. I opened my phone and asked AI. Within seconds, I had 3 possible diagnoses, 2 lifestyle suggestions, and 1 existential crisis. Somewhere along the way, something shifted. Doctors became expensive. Medicines became chemicals, and suddenly, everything natural felt morally superior. Why spend on a ...

  I once tried to read War and Peace . I say “tried” in the same way people say they “tried” to wake up early. There was effort, yes, but also confusion, fatigue, and a quiet sense of defeat. I made it through possibly 100 pages. Many people were introduced so quickly that I began to suspect the book was less a novel and more an endurance test. How many names can one human brain hold before it shuts down? Each character had a purpose. Each one was doing something important. But to me, they became “that guy,” “the other guy,” and “someone who seemed important but I forgot why.” Eventually, I wasn’t reading it anymore. Later, I mentioned this to my mother. She told me she had read the same book when she was younger and hadn’t found it interesting either. Too many characters, she said. It drained her attention. But she finished it out of sheer determination. I chose not to follow that path. There is a certain wisdom in knowing when to stop, especially when your brain has already filed...