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By:

Bhalchandra Chorghade

11 August 2025 at 1:54:18 pm

Healing Beyond the Clinic

Dr Kirti Samudra “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This thought by Mother Teresa finds reflection in the life of Panvel-based diabetologist Dr Kirti Samudra, who has spent decades caring not only for her family but also thousands of patients who see her as their guide. As we mark International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that women of substance often shape society quietly through compassion, resilience and dedication. Doctor, mother, homemaker,...

Healing Beyond the Clinic

Dr Kirti Samudra “If you want to change the world, go home and love your family.” This thought by Mother Teresa finds reflection in the life of Panvel-based diabetologist Dr Kirti Samudra, who has spent decades caring not only for her family but also thousands of patients who see her as their guide. As we mark International Women’s Day, stories like hers remind us that women of substance often shape society quietly through compassion, resilience and dedication. Doctor, mother, homemaker, mentor and philanthropist — Dr Samudra has balanced many roles with commitment. While she manages a busy medical practice, her deeper calling has always been service. For her, medicine is not merely a profession but a responsibility towards the people who depend on her guidance. Nagpur to Panvel Born and raised in Nagpur, Dr Samudra completed her medical education there before moving to Mumbai in search of better opportunities. The early years were challenging. With determination, she and her husband Girish Samudra, an entrepreneur involved in underwater pipeline projects, chose to build their life in Panvel. At a time when the town was still developing and healthcare awareness was limited, she decided to make it both her workplace and home. What began with modest resources gradually grew into a trusted medical practice built on long-standing relationships with patients. Fighting Diabetes Recognising the growing threat of diabetes, Dr Samudra dedicated her career to treating and educating patients about the disease. Over the years, she has registered nearly 30,000 patients from Panvel and nearby areas. Yet she believes treatment alone is not enough. “Diabetes is a lifelong disease. Medicines are important, but patient education is equally critical. If people understand the condition, they can manage it better and prevent complications,” she says. For more than 27 years, she has organised an Annual Patients’ Education Programme, offering diagnostic tests at concessional rates and sessions on lifestyle management. Family, Practice With her husband frequently travelling for business, much of the responsibility of raising their two children fell on Dr Samudra. Instead of expanding her practice aggressively, she kept it close to home and adjusted her OPD timings around her children’s schedules. “It was not easy,” she recalls, “but I wanted to fulfil my responsibilities as a mother while continuing to serve my patients.” Beyond Medicine Today, Dr Samudra also devotes time to social initiatives through the Bharat Vikas Parishad, where she serves as Regional Head. Her projects include  Plastic Mukta Vasundhara , which promotes reduced use of single-use plastic, and  Sainik Ho Tumchyasathi , an initiative that sends Diwali  faral  (snack hamper) to Indian soldiers posted at the borders. Last year alone, 15,000 boxes were sent to troops. Despite decades of service, she measures success not in wealth but in goodwill. “I may not have earned huge money,” she says, “but I have earned immense love and respect from my patients. That is something I will always be grateful for.”

Draining the Crimson Swamp

Why Trump is right to turn off the spigot to Harvard.

In a move as bold as it is overdue, President Donald Trump’s administration recently froze more than $2.2 billion in grants and $60 million in federal contracts to Harvard University. The decision came in response to the university’s refusal to comply with White House demands for governance reform and for cracking down on rampant campus activism, much of it couched in increasingly dangerous strains of antisemitism in context of pro-Palestinian protests. Within hours, the usual suspects (former President Barack Obama among them) rushed to frame Harvard’s intransigence as a ‘brave’ stand for academic freedom.


In truth, the university, like Columbia and others, has long become a sanctuary for ideological radicalism, a cartel of illiberal orthodoxy masquerading as higher education.


Trump’s move is a thunderclap in the ivy-covered echo chamber of elite academia. It is not just about campus activism but about institutional rot, foreign influence, declining academic standards and the grotesque politicisation of elite law schools. Harvard, like Yale and Stanford, has transformed from a meritocratic engine into a sinecure for activists, ideologues and opportunists. This was not inevitable. It was cultivated, encouraged and sanctified by the very people now clutching their pearls.


Victor Davis Hanson, the American classicist and political commentator, has trenchantly chronicled the drift of elite law schools away from empiricism and toward ideological capture. Harvard Law, once a crucible for rigorous legal minds, now resembles a hybrid of political seminar and activist training camp. When powerful law firms raised the alarm over antisemitism on campus and hinted that they might stop recruiting Harvard students, radical law students responded not with introspection but with retaliation by coordinating Wikipedia smear campaigns against those very firms.


Hanson rightly notes that these law schools are no longer judged by their capacity to produce excellent lawyers, but by their fealty to fashionable pieties of diversity, equity and inclusion.


Even as their bar passage rates cratered - Stanford saw 15 percent of its graduates fail the California bar in 2022 - administrators doubled down on post-George Floyd curricular and admissions experiments. At Harvard, even basic undergraduate mathematics now requires remedial instruction. The future stewards of American law are being forged not through rigor but through ideological grooming. Is it any wonder that America’s legal institutions appear increasingly unmoored?

What Trump has done is cut off the oxygen supply. In withholding public funds, he is sending a message to a decadent academic establishment that it is not above accountability. For too long, elite universities have been shielded by the myth of meritocracy, even as they traded standards for slogans, replaced critical thinking with identity politics, and opened their doors to foreign capital with little concern for the consequences.


Rajeev Malhotra, a public intellectual and longtime critic of American academia, has spent decades exposing the ideological and financial corruption within Harvard and its peers. He has shown how institutions like Harvard have eagerly absorbed millions from Middle Eastern donors (particularly from Qatar) while enabling a curriculum and campus climate increasingly hostile to Jews, Hindus and anyone not aligned with the prevailing progressive orthodoxy. One cannot accept foreign largesse and then pretend to be a neutral arbiter of truth.


And yet, from the Obama corner comes the familiar sermonising. Harvard, Obama declared, had set an “example” by resisting “unlawful” demands from the Trump administration.


But what does he mean by lawful? The Obama era was marked by the quiet empowerment of the very ideological currents now rampant on campus. That shift laid the intellectual foundations for today’s campus nihilism, where students justify the silencing of dissent as a moral imperative, and administrators indulge rather than correct.


Stanford, faced with plummeting bar passage rates and growing reputational damage, has begun course-correcting by readjusting admissions policies and disciplining activist overreach. The results speak for themselves: bar passage rebounded to 95 percent in 2024. What Trump’s gambit offers is a similar nudge to the rest of the elite academy. The goal is not censorship, as his critics claim, but realignment away from activism and back toward excellence.

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