A REPLY TO "WHY I WILL NEVER ALLOW MY CHILD TO BECOME A DOCTOR IN INDIA"

I am a doctor and my parents are too. So, I am justified in speaking on behalf of my community. I am grieved and saddened at reading all the latest outbursts against doctors, both by doctors and layman alike.

Yes, becoming and being a doctor is tough. We undergo years of rigorous training. We witness more than our share of deaths, when friends our age are discovering first romances. We are expected to do all the hospital's dirty work for the most part of our studying career. We study and pass exams only to write more exams. We live on pocket money right through our 20s and even up to our 30s. We eat lousy meals at crappy places and sleep in the worst beds. We live inside of a hospital more than we ever stay anywhere else. We give expert lifestyle and dietary advice, but we never seem to follow them as we are too busy to have time for ourselves. We spend our Friday nights reading up, preparing for a big surgery on the weekend. We watch movies in bits and pieces on laptops with time squeezed here and there. We lose all of our non-medico friends. We meet up with friends only to speak more of medical stuff. We never seem to have time for anyone or anything else.

Yes,we have gruelling lives. Thanks to the uncouth behavior our Indian genetics has bred, the gruel is now mixed with sizable doses of anxiety and defensiveness.

But let me tell every doctor/doctor-to-be reading this, remember, we fight disease. We fight it every day, we tear it down, decimate it and decrease its chance of killing our patient. We send death running like a crying bitch, by telling death to screw himself. That is the battle we are fighting, and it is the only battle worth fighting for. It is such a high, I tell you. Students, this is the high you should be chasing for the rest of your lives. You will be defeating death. Mere mortals cannot do that, only SUPERHEROES. We are superheroes, today, tomorrow and for always. You may have wins and loses. The key, though, win or lose, you must never fail. And the only way to fail is to not fight.

You may ask, "Why do we even try,when the barriers are so high and the odds are so low. Why don't we pack it in and go home. It would be so so much easier. "

Because in the end, there is NO GLORY IN EASY!

 P.S - Yes, pole dancers and bartenders have their share of criticisms and hardships too.