PM Narendra Modi tells doctors to get it write

If PM Narendra Modi had his way, Omar Khayyam might well have had to redact his pronouncement that the poet believed was engraved in stone, “The Moving Finger writes; and having writ/ Moves on: nor all thy piety and Wit/ Shall lure it back to cancel half a line,/ Nor all thy Tears wash out a word of it.” According to the PM’s latest diktat, the ‘Moving Fingers’ of doctors making out medical prescriptions must ensure that the writing is legible, with all the i’s dotted and the t’s correctly crossed. Medical prescriptions are legendarily near impossible to read, a fact many pharmacists take advantage of to dupe customers into buying costly branded drugs when their cheaper generic variants are available.

That big pharma can be big harma is underscored by the story of the terminally ill patient who, cured, went to thank his doctor and promptly succumbed to a fatal heart attack when presented with the humongous bill for his treatment. However, the PM’s injunction of ‘Physician, heal thyself ’ could well backfire on the political class as a whole. Netas across the board in their election manifestos prescribe cure-all panaceas for all the many ailments from which our body politic only too obviously suffers. But once the polls are over, no amount of spin-doctoring can disguise the fact that all those electoral prescriptions were pure gobbledegook.