Week 1506 - Invites, Light Bars, Medical Seats, Macs

A round-up of the week that was

Bhavin Jankharia

17 Mar 2026

The Concept Explained

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I have been struggling with long form writing for some time, because of a variety of issues that are not really worth enumerating. And yet, I constantly have ideas and I thought perhaps I can gather those through the week and post them on a Sunday night or Monday morning. Let’s see how this goes.

General

Invites Rant

It is only getting worse. Older people have forgotten etiquette...what it means to pick up the phone and call. Every invite is on WhatsApp with a stupid “please treat this as a personal invite”. How is that personal? Leaving aside very close friends and family where this doesn’t matter, even if I like attending an occasional party and meeting colleagues, friends or family, it is me taking time out to attend their function. The least the inviter can do is take that little extra effort to make that one phone call.

And while I don’t expect GenZs and millennials to call, but then I am never invited to any of their parties anyway, how can people my age or a little younger or older behave like GenZs and millennials?

If they are peers or younger I don’t even bother to reply but if they are older or senior, out of respect I still reply saying that I have a prior commitment. It feels like I have become an outlier among my own peers but I didn’t realize that grace and politeness ever went out of fashion.

Medical Colleges, Seats

This is what Medical Dialogues reported.

Altogether 1,28,976 MBBS, 85,020 PG seats and 818 medical colleges are available in the country as per the National Medical Commission (NMC), the Health Ministry recently told the Parliament while citing NMC data and regulations. Further, under CSS schemes, 4977 additional MBBS seats and 8058 additional PG seats have been approved in medical colleges across the country, Union Health Minister Smt Anupriya Patel informed the Rajya Sabha.

This is not counting the FMGs and the Ayush doctors. All I can say is that we are being flooded with doctors, most of whom only want to work in towns and cities. Training has always been poor leaving aside the top tier colleges and all we are doing is magnifying that gap in expertise.

We will probably become providers of medical talent to the rest of the world if we continue to keep increasing these numbers, while the corporates will get cheap labor for their hospitals.

Tech

Light Bars

I have written earlier about my my 2-screen workstation setup using a MacMini M4. I set up another one in Lonavala, where I try to go at least once a week and one of the things that was missing was a monitor light bar, which helps illuminate the table in front of the screens. For the rest of my workstation setups, I have been using light bars from Benq or other tech companies that cost Rs. 13,000 to Rs. 15,000. I was searching for a less expensive solution and came across an LED lamp for screen - the Lagergang - as it is called at Ikea, costing Rs. 1,859 after taxes. I kid you not...20% the cost of a regular tech company based light bar. I ordered it direct to Lonavala, installation took all of 5 minutes and it works like a dream. Sometimes...there are no explanations why.

Love Affair

Om Malik, who I follow religiously has just written a love letter to the new Apple Neo, a 599 USD laptop.

For me, the game changer has been the MacMini M4. Everything that I have been able to do over the last year, all the teaching videos and content that I have been creating, the speed and accuracy of my reporting, my productivity and workflow can be traced to this 599 USD box. Yes, when you add the monitors, keyboard, mouse, trackpad and other peripherals, the cost goes up, but this setup makes you want to do things. Perhaps this is my cognitive deload. Creating instead of consuming.

Reading

The Amazing History of Liver Transplant Surgery

For those interested in how some things in medicine only happen when mavericks keep pushing against conventional wisdom, here is this great piece by Anish Koka.