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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.”

Rio’s Deadly Reckoning

Brazil’s deadliest police raid exposes the futility of a decades-long war on drugs and the inequality that sustains the racket.

The police operation in Rio de Janeiro that killed more than 130 people this week was the deadliest in Brazil’s history. What authorities hailed as a ‘success’ against the Red Command – Rio’s most powerful gang - has instead exposed the brutality, impunity and political convenience that sustain Brazil’s cycle of urban violence.


Over 113 alleged members were arrested, and caches of weapons and drugs seized. Yet for all the rhetoric of victory, it was a grim reminder of Brazil’s failed security doctrine. The images of residents forced to recover bodies themselves evoked less triumph than tragedy. President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva’s promise of a forensic inquiry and federal oversight is a familiar gesture in a country where accountability has long been the first casualty of the drug war.


The scene could have been drawn from any decade since Brazil’s military dictatorship. The state’s heavy-handed approach to ‘public security’ dates back to the 1960s, when the generals institutionalised the notion that poverty equalled subversion. In the 1980s, as democracy returned, the vacuum left by an absent welfare state was filled not by reform but by repression. The favelas (Rio’s sprawling informal settlements) became both scapegoat and battleground. Police units, nominally fighting organised crime, acted with near-total impunity; the drug gangs, born in prisons such as Rio’s Ilha Grande and São Paulo’s Carandiru, turned into parallel governments, dispensing crude justice and employment where the state would not.


Carandiru itself remains an infamous symbol. In 1992, 111 inmates were killed when police stormed the São Paulo penitentiary to quell a riot. The massacre sparked international outrage but little structural change. Nearly three decades later, in 2021, Rio’s Jacarezinho neighbourhood witnessed another bloodbath: 28 people killed in a police raid. Each time, officials vowed to restore order. And each time, the gangs multiplied.


Today’s Red Command (Comando Vermelho) grew out of that carceral past. Its roots lie in the alliance between common criminals and leftist militants jailed together during the dictatorship. What began as an ideological fraternity morphed, by the 1980s, into Brazil’s most lethal criminal network, sustained by cocaine trafficking and control of territory. Its rival, the São Paulo-based First Capital Command (PCC), now dominates much of Brazil’s vast hinterland. The result is a fractured criminal landscape: gangs that are at once transnational businesses and local feudal powers, entrenching cycles of violence that police raids rarely break.


For politicians, such operations serve a purpose. They project authority in a country weary of chaos. Castro, a conservative allied to former president Jair Bolsonaro, has built his image around law-and-order theatrics. Likewise, Lula, though more conciliatory, cannot appear soft on crime as he tries to steady a fragile coalition government. Both know that televised raids play well with Brazil’s anxious middle class.


What makes the Penha operation so shocking is not its novelty but its scale. To plan for two months and still record over a hundred deaths suggests less an accident than a doctrine. Brazil’s police are among the world’s deadliest: in 2023 alone, they killed more than 6,000 people, overwhelmingly young, Black and poor. Few of these cases lead to prosecution. Each new massacre further erodes trust in institutions, pushing residents to rely on the very gangs the state claims to fight.


The deeper malaise is political. Brazil’s drug war, like America’s before it, has substituted spectacle for strategy. Successive governments have failed to pair policing with social investment, education, or drug-law reform. Instead, they have militarised the favelas and normalised extrajudicial violence. When the army was deployed to Rio’s streets ahead of the 2016 Olympics, officials spoke of ‘pacification.’ Yet the pacified zones soon reverted to contested slums, while corruption scandals hollowed out the very police units meant to uphold order.


Real security in Brazil will depend less on helicopters and rifles than on restoring legitimacy to the state through fair policing, judicial reform and opportunities that undercut the gangs’ social base.

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