HEALTHCARE · ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE · PATIENT EXPERIENCE Years ago, at a government hospital, I heard a surgeon say about a patient who kept asking him, "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. They speak...
Holiday Reading was a wonderful concept in my children’s school. They were given a book to read in English and Hindi during summer vacations, and then their understanding was tested, and later prizes were showered during the annual function, which again were books. These books were classics, and a few were even contemporary; I, too, got to read new kinds of literature with them. The curriculum in ICSE and ISC when I studied was relentless. There was A Midsummer’s Night Dream, Julius Caesar, Joan of Arc, Richard the Second, and Mayor of Casterbridge in successive years. I reminisced to my boys. They seemed to find it incredibly amusing that their mother performed poorly in the subject. To add salt to my injury, my grandfather even shared a school report card that stated “Needs to work hard in English” and a grade of 4, marked in red, describing the inevitable. This report card remains the only family heirloom of my academic record, despite being in tatters now. There’s a silver lining t...