Vanditaa's blog

  In a recent incident, popular podcaster and YouTuber Ranveer Allahbadia faced widespread criticism for making an inappropriate remark that was deemed unacceptable by many. Thank God for that, or else we are now a society where everything under the sun is rather normalised. I wouldn’t repeat the remark here, I can’t, it's out of my scope to write anything like that. Anyway, after that so-called remark on a show run by a popular comedian, Samay Raina was aired and shared, the internet was set on fire. I casually opened my Twitter on Sunday and was taken aback by the clip which was being circulated. It looked something like this: Some people, popular in the world of the internet sitting on a panel and roasting a contestant that stood in front of them. A highly vulgar remark was made by Ranveer, and the rest of the panel members along with the audience joined in laughter and applause. ‘Ah! Isn’t all this becoming rather common nowadays!’ was my first reaction, following which ...

Technology has changed so much around us in the past few years, isn’t it? From getting miraculously connected to each other through phones, we have grown multifold since the time mobiles were first introduced. Internet, international connectivity, google search, and social media, we seem to have travelled ahead at the speed of light. While many of us were still adapting to all of this, a big word- artificial intelligence started circulating. Intelligence and artificial, look like two opposite words that have been joined together , is what came to my mind when I first heard about it. Before I could know, this technology, now popular as AI had already infiltrated many apps and websites. Someone asked me if I use ChatGPT, and I got partially shocked to discover what it was. In between all this lately, there was another popular news that mentioned how an MIT graduate had invented a device that could read your mind. He mentioned how it could google questions within your mind and order a p...

A recent Instagram post by a well-known celebrity writer read “They should give away free birth control pills on all airlines as a public service.” I juggled for a long time to understand what it meant, but couldn’t until I saw the only hashtag the writer had used as a caption beneath, #annoyingchildrenonboard. This post came after almost a week of relaxing and luxurious holiday that he had in Thailand. As most of the posts by this writer are relatable, at times funny and witty, it took me a while to comprehend what he had written. How could he post such a thing ? I thought, and scrolled through the comments section. In the comments I saw outpouring negativity for little children and their parents inside airplanes. “It’s so irritating!” one comment read, “I wanted to sleep peacefully on my three-hour flight, but the child behind just couldn’t shut up. Why do people produce when they can’t teach their children basic etiquette!!!” “So relatable,” read another, “an annoying baby was cryin...

One I marvel at the clarity that most young adults have nowadays with respect to their careers. Because well, I was an ever-confused young adult; or wait, maybe not. I belong to a family of more or less medicos. Starting from my paternal and maternal grandparents, to my mom, dad, most maternal and paternal uncles, and aunts, we are a family of a wide array of different medical specialists. From dining table discussions about patients to some doctor-patient talk, which I used to overhear while doing my homework in my mom’s clinic; my subconscious mind had accumulated enough data to evoke the hidden medico in me. Thus, I always knew I wanted to be a doctor, a cardiologist if I can be specific. Opting biology and reading text for the premedical entrance examination thus came naturally to me. Clearing the examination with an average rank, good enough to fetch me a college which could grant me a degree, but not as great so as to get me the top-notch colleges then followed. “...

  I have been thinking of writing this article for the past many weeks, ever since I saw a 16–17-year-old girl who makes Instagram reels in her local language and has gained many followers on that platform, interviewed by the head editor of a newspaper in his office. Does making funny reels, or having followers on social media make us so important, that we get to sit in an editor’s room for an interview? I thought first. If this girl is been made the hero for what she is doing now, how will she sustain to be a hero in the future, is what I thought second? And, does being a hero just need you to sit at home, and post? That is what I thought third. Our society stands on some deep foundations that have been laid down over a long period of years. It has been with the struggle and work of the great things done in the past that we have been able to reach where we are today. Be it technology or medicine, be it literature or art, the roots of all of these have evolved with years of learn...

Apart from what Covid took away from us, there has been a sad rise in deaths of the younger lot because of other health reasons too. It’s no more uncommon to hear about deaths because of heart attack or other medical reasons at a younger age. Be it any profession or any gender such unfortunate loss of lives is not rare anymore. Times have certainly changed. Our lifestyles are not the same anymore and our priorities have changed drastically. We live in a world where everything is possible, there are no limits to anything, and rules or discipline? Well! We have our own set of rules and love to break them too. We have created our own world of disorder. We want to stay the same throughout our lives; because we have stopped believing in aging too. To stay young at heart is a popular saying. Keeping the good part of it, which relates to staying jovial and fun-loving aside, we do have to understand that every cell of our body is aging every single day. Stressing over every single thing, follo...

  You maybe surprised to know that I have named my own self! Not because I didn’t like what my parents named me, but I accidentally uttered Vandita when the principal of the school where I was getting my admission done asked my name. Ever since I have known this, I used to wonder if my life would have been any different if I was rather called Nalini which was the name that was originally given to me by my parents. I have asked myself bizarre questions like, would I have had a different fate? Would I have bonded with different people? And so on and so forth. It was only with passing years that I realized that the only difference that it could have made in my life technically, would have been the position in which I appeared for my regular vivas during exams. My life in general would have been the same otherwise. It wasn’t until recently but, that I had to question the importance of a name in one’s life all over again after I starting calling my son by a not so unique or a rather co...

None of us had imagined that we would ever see a crisis in health as huge as the one that we are witnessing currently.   One disease and the entire world has come to a standstill. But then, what is life if we can predict it? Coronavirus, which has shaken everyone with its massive spread, has slowly moved towards community spread in India. Reasons for its relatively slower rise in numbers here can be various. The timely and stringent actions taken by the government, our immunity to survive it due to poor overall hygiene of the country; or the relatively larger number of infections that we already face. However, fear of rising numbers remains, because we are a densely populated land. The losses that COVID has caused are many and grave but then, there is one good thing that it has brought to us as a country. It is our efforts to improve our existing healthcare system. It will be premature to say if these efforts are temporary or permanent but it’s very positive to see how w...

The streets are empty, the public places are shut, most offices have been locked down, and some countries are closed too. Most of us are confined to our four walls, some getting more creative and more aware of themselves, and most who are frustrated and bored and are just waiting for this pandemic to end. We, humans, are the smartest of all species that exist on this planet. It’s us who rule the earth. By having invented most things that exist around us, to using nature at our convenience it’s us who decide the way everything functions. In the short lives that we live, we often forget that we aren’t as important as we think. We also forget that disturbing the harmony that exists around us for our convenience may cause greater harm in times that may follow after we cease to exist. But then nature has its own ways of reminding us the same, isn’t it? The existing coronavirus pandemic appears to one of them. One of the smallest existing entity on earth- a virus has reminded the r...

Of all the dynamics that surround us on an everyday basis, the most important aspect of our lives remains our relationships. It can be our relationship with our elders, our friends, our helpers, our colleagues or the most hyped and talked about relationships with our spouse or lover. In a world full of billions of humans beings, it is our connection with these handful of people around us that makes our lives more meaningful and beautiful. But unfortunately, it is the same relations which at times also become the cause of our endless sufferings and pain. The suffering from a relation is labeled to occur because of the change in dynamics due to lack of understanding, generation gap, fading away of love with time or altered emotional component of either person in the relation. But irrespective of love and emotion, which of course, are one the most marketed terms today, the only aspect of a relation which is highly overlooked and which has the potential to alter almost everything betwee...

Two junior doctors were badly attacked by the attendees of a patient, who died from cardiac arrest in a medical college in Bengal on Monday! Unfortunately, I had posted a very similar blog last year in March 2018; but the recent incidence has forced me to post this yet again. This is just one of the many incidences which happen on a very frequent basis with doctors and have been on an unfortunate rise in the past few years. I am ashamed to even type that the doctors are beaten up, shamed, dragged into consumer courts and at times even abused by the patients or their attendees for anything that goes  UNEXPECTED! I have grown up in a family immersed in medical science, and at present, I reside in a campus full of medical graduates. I have lived with doctors all around me since always and now that I am practicing as one myself, I realize the level of responsibility, care, concern, and compromise that the doctors carry on their shoulders. Medicine is not a branch where things ...

Tobacco a slow and not-so-silent a killer surrounds most of us in our day to day life. Smoking tobacco or chewing tobacco is considered as normal and routine by many. Having a bad day, take a puff, tired of looking at the computer screens, let’s go out and draw some smoke. Smokeless tobacco which is available to be chewed as gutka and other products constitute yet another common break from work for many, or at times is chewed for “passing time ” as well! And yes, just in case you don’t consume tobacco even then chances are that you might be under the radar of passive tobacco consumption because of someone near to you. You might be inhaling tobacco smoke emitted by your spouse at home, your colleague at work or by people around you in an authorized Hookah café! Being engulfed in a cloud full of poison does sound bad for sure, but the good news is that this bad is totally and entirely in our own hands. Tobacco in any form can have a plethora of ill-effects on the human body. Fro...

The recent “Aunty” incidence that went viral!   In a very recent episode a video on the social media went viral. The video that I am mentioning here is the one where a middle-aged woman popularly referred to as "auntyji" made a sad remark on a girl wearing a short dress. The comment though hasn’t been recorded exactly in her words in the video but she is alleged to have said, that for the short dress that the girl was wearing she deserves to get raped! The aftermath was obvious; the girl along with a few other friends who were accompanying her got in a heated argument with her. They repeatedly asked her to apologize but the lady did not, instead, she threatened to call the police which got the girls more violent who in response threatened her for the same. The argument was then joined by another lady, who is a mother, she was seen to boldly put her point across. She is seen supporting the girls in the video, where she says that she gives her daughters complete freedom of...