The End

Well, all good things come to an end, and unfortunately so do mediocre and bad ones as well. Since November, since I started writing this blog, I have come to realise that (a) I haven't anything really worth saying, and (b) It's better to appear stupid than to open ones mouth and clear all doubts.

So thank you everyone who did read the trash I had written. I won't waste any more of your time, so it's finito. Goodbye.

The Patent Trap

Affordable Healthcare vs Pharmaceutical Profits - I've never been able to satisfactorily find a reasonable answer to this question. As a Bengali brought up among persuasive socialists I'm pulled one way, as a person working in an MNC pharma company, I'm pulled to the other.

Given the burden of healthcare costs, where even people in developed countries shudder about the cost of medicines, it is easy to blame pharmaceutical companies with obscenely high profit margins - a rough calculation of the cost of some medicines gives an estimate of more than 2000% profit margin. Even with Medicare, people in developed countries dread the rising healthcare costs of old age. In poor countries, if you fall ill, you die without adequate healthcare, your family starves to provide you with whatever healthcare they can afford. A friend of mine, a doctor, who's responsible for a line of Sanofi Aventis' oncology medicines, was once privately telling a colleague of his that he couldn't wish him better sales - because that mean that families of more cancer patients would be going bankrupt...

On the other hand, I've seen the sheer cost of pharmaceutical research. I've seen the sheer number of candidate molecules being screened, and so many promising molecules falling by the wayside. it costs a king's ransom to get a new drug out, and a lifetime of dedicated research usually results in a total of zero. A Gertrude Elion is a rarity - hundreds of equally brilliant scientists have gone to their maker empty handed.

It takes a huge incentive for an organisation to invest trillions of dollars to fund drug discovery - in the absence of a potential to earn multi-billion dollar profit, no business would risk blowing up funds the equal of many nations' GDPs to find the elusive treatment for cancer, TB, HIV etc. All that half a century of government funded research in India has resulted in is a handful of drugs, none of them successful. And all the price-controlled pharma companies in India have managed is to develop cheap copies of western research.

And because there is inadequate profit from diseases of the develping countries, few companies invest in them.

Is there a solution? Many pharmaceutical companies are involved in private-public partnership to provide drugs to the needy. For the companies, it is the most that is sustainable in the long run, but it is still not enough - treatment is still too expensive for most.

Is there a solution? I don't know. The sharpest minds in the world are working on it, but I fear that there may be no easy answer. And cheap populism from politicians will only complicate the road to an equitable solution.

High Performance Behaviours

My office is sending me on a training of high-performance behaviour - it's a British company, so the non-American spelling. I'm told that it will transform me into a brilliant team-leader who will get the best work out of oneself, and out of my team (in a sotto voce: at no added cost).

Great! So too bad for the hard driving task-master of yesteryears - no commanding, ordering bully, at whose snap of a finger things would get done. Now it's the time for soft skills - consultative, participatory, teamwork, all the alluring words which beguile you into a warm fuzzy feeling that you work in an organisation that cares for the employees. It's a new world where the team drives the business in the same direction, without a crack of a whip.

It's good to tell these things to new recruits; in fact I get a kick out of this when talking at campus presentations.

Unfortunately, the truth is a tad more real than the HR patter. Inaugarating the HPB training session for another group of my colleagues, the Managing Director was brutally honest - "If you do not exhibit High Performance Behaviour, you're out of the company!"

Ouch! The slave driver isn't out of business yet!

A fig for those by law protected...

Every paper and every news channel in Delhi is busy exposing the shocking details of the rape and murder of 30 children by Moninder Singh and his cook, Surendra. Everyone knows the details of the tamasha, so I'll not repeat the gory details. Everyone and his uncle has expressed horror at how low a human being can sink. But, unlike the poor people who have to be prevented by the police from forming a mob and rioting, most of us have missed the real point.

The true horror is that the police did not do anything because the victims were poor people. That too is a fact of life that we often try to shut our eyes and pretend does not exist. Ask any maid, or driver or sweeper - do they expect the police to help them if they are in trouble? The usual response is that they prefer to avoid the police, because if thy approach them, they will have to pay bribes, and still get harassed, and anyway, the police will do nothing for them.

There's a saying in Bengali:

Baaghe chule ek gha,
Police chule tin gha...

Roughly translated: A policeman's bite is three times worse than a tiger's. That's a common man's perception of the police. Not just in Delhi - anywhere in India

Personally, I suspect that there is nothing more ghastly or scandalous behind the crime - no politician enjoying a bit of necrophilia on the side, no senior policeman farming out kids to paedophils, no juicy story to be dug out.

What's there is worse, a sad tale of neglect and callousness. What the police are trying to cover up is not the crime of commision - namely the rape and murder of so many children, but the crime of omission - the refusal of the police to investigate while it was still possible to save the lives of most of the children.

I'll tell you what I guess will happen - the criminal has been arrested and will face the music in court 20 years from now. Som policemen have been dismissed - thT will stay. Senior policement have been suspended - after the case has faded from popular memory (i.e. the media has turned to a new story), these guys will be brought back and life will go on as usual.

Even after this, will the police take a poor person seriously when he/she comes to file a case? You must be joking!

If you don't live in an ivory tower, you'd know that when a rich or even a middle class person commits a crime against a poor person, there will be policemen, who for a consideration, will advise you on how to hush up the case, or at worst, escape from the clutches of the law. They'll scold you if you surrender, and tell you that you're a fool not to have disappeared and taken anticipatory bail. They'll advise you on how much to pay the victim or the victim's family (there will be a percentage deducted from that for every cop in the station, depending on the rank). This was true from the Mughal era, still true under the British and true even now.