Skip to main content

Specialisation



“Specialization is for insects,” said Robert Anson Heinlein. A human being should be able to handle his/her children, prepare food, manage the society, work with a smartphone, and so on. Add as many things as you want to that list like fight occasional depression, stay clear of maniacs and fanatics and a whole lot of people, weed your garden, or whatever.

When I was a student, a teacher of mine defined specialisation as studying more and more about less and less until you know everything about nothing. The teacher was a Ph.D. himself. Later on, as a post-graduate, when I wished to do Ph.D. I thought of the giggle of Salman Rushdie’s Satan in his Satanic Verses. No guide would accept a thesis about a hair in Satan’s tail, my friend dissuaded me. That friend had chosen to specialise on the role of Fate’s star in Thomas Hardy’s moral cosmos. He went on to become a Doctor of Philosophy who had specialised on the impact of Fate on Tess of the d’Urbervilles’ hymen. I went on to struggle with the hair on Satan’s tail and remained a Jack of many trades like blogging when I was not engaged in a trapeze dance between despairing and hoping.


I don’t know how happy Tess’s hymen kept my friend in his subsequent years. I know that Satan’s tail entertained me thoroughly for most part of my life. Anyway the personal experiences of two individuals can’t be a proof for universal truths, notwithstanding the momentous significance of specialisation in today’s world.

In the olden days, if I went to an Ayurvedic doc in my village with a complaint of chronic headache he would put me a on a course of holistic treatment with severe restrictions on my diet. At the end of the treatment not only would my headache vanish but also my whole body would be rejuvenated. Such a treatment would take months if not years.


Today I go to a multi-speciality hospital with my complaint. I would be put through half a dozen tests and scans before I would be directed to meet an equal number of specialists ranging from neurologist to urologist and reflexologist to trichologist. Finally my headache will vanish in a few days. That’s the miracle of specialisation. Never mind that the medicines used in the meanwhile would gift me such side effects that I will never be able to live without the assistance of a lot more specialists hereafter. The specialists are available, so why worry?



PS. Written for In[di]spire Edition 276: #SpecialistVsGeneralist

Comments

  1. Jyotirmoy SarkarJune 25, 2019 at 8:31 PM

    Very much logical writing, i totally agree with your views.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...
2 comments
Read more

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...
11 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...
11 comments
Read more