Doctors vs Engineers

Indian parents see these two are the only two professions they want their children in. I thought it would be fun to compare these two as well.
So what are the differences - for doctors the duration of the course is much larger, but then again you hardly find any qualified doctor come unemployed slowdown or recession or whatever. For doctors the effort during the course is much more intense than in engineering colleges. Doctors get more respect in the society than engineers - they apparently are in a noble profession and they save lives.  Lets face it - there are too many engineers around, being a computer engineer is the most ridiculous cliché for an Indian now.
So why is this so and why is it that there are still more people rushing to engineering colleges than to a medical school ? Well firstly, the seats are much less - so getting into a reasonable medical school is a herculean task. Also the investment needed in terms of money, time and effort may be much more. Another thing is that the students who simply do not have much brains can somehow survive engineering but surviving medical school without a brain sounds much more improbable. So the reason for this is obvious - engineers baring a select few working on the most critical projects are not working on something as critical as a person's life. So they can afford to have relatively incompetent people in the team but incompetent doctors are much more risky.
About the pay I guess its the whole demand and supply thing - what doctors do has been made into a obscure knowledge and common people are not supposed to treat themselves or others. While in case of engineering everyone will give it a shot, we have mechanical and chemical engineers getting into software development and we have commerce graduates as well. Soon enough we will have secondary school drop outs trying their hand at it perhaps !! Another thing is the work hours. The dearth of qualified doctors makes it necessary to overwork the few ones around. While engineers would do a 50 hour week 70 for a doctor is not very rare. So obviously they need to be compensated for their longer hours.
The thing is more about what you are good at, I think money, social standing, personal life, peace of mind or stability are important and as long as you take care of them in some moderation you should go for one more thing without which everything else don't add up to much - it is whether you love it. If you love it and are good at something then only can you respect yourself and without which the rest don't mean much at all.

Congress and India

I have tried largely to keep this forum a pace for intellectual debate and avoided politics, but more importantly it is a forum for things I feel strongly about, so I will deviate from this practice this one time. In fact, I started with writing a status on my Facebook page and decided this warranted a more laborious effort.

I have never been a big fan of 'Mahatma' Gandhi and similarly, by consequence of that choice, of the Congress. I, like a large number of Indians, have a feeling of resentment for the fact that Gandhi made us come out as a nation of ultra pacifists to the point of looking more like beggars with his brand of Satyagraha politics. I do feel that leaders like Sardar Patel, Subhash Chandra Bose should have had a bigger say in shaping the future of  India. From how the events unfolded, and the way that Gandhi-Nehru family has dominated the political scene for most of the time, it feels that India has been under the rule of a clan and makes one wonder how much better it is for us to be under their rule instead of our erstwhile colonial masters.

The only alternative I have seen (other than Janata Dal in the late 70s and 80s) is BJP. Hailing from Bengal, I find Left, with their focus on arresting any possible development, a despicable set of people. The BJP was obviously seen as a ray of new hope by Indians and hence given the vote during 1998-2004 under the leadership of Atal Bihari Vajpayee (ABV). As I look at it, India is a country with tremendous potential which was born some 60 odd years back. The problem was that being immature, having never governed a country before, the leaders did make some obvious mistakes and obviously have had members who are corrupt. Sadly, a political establishment with no corruption is not a realistic dream and a leader giving us that remains something to be seen only in Bollywood movies. The problem is not that Indians are more corruptible and so we end up having the more corrupt leaders, it is the simple fact that man at his worst is an asshole and he tends to take advantage of very opportunity to do any evil he can get away with. The problem is that somehow this mechanism to prosecute such worst of men has been a total failure. More realistically, I think having an establishment in which the major leaders are not corrupt and do not allow their juniors open ground for corruption and punishment for those stupid/unlucky enough to be caught is a fairly reasonable demand. With the way voting goes on and the multi-party system - coalition politics come into play and to a cynical mind it kind of legalizes presence of some corruption. Given that, I have seen that there were scandals a plenty during the BJP or rather NDA (the BJP led coalition) rule but these do not compare to the ones we have seen in the recent years with the Congress led UPA coalition. Also, interesting point to note is that the strong mandate Congress received made them less feeble to the whims of their partners. Still, we have seen the Hon. MMS looking the other way as the country is being plundered. I do believe that if it was only some junior minister from a coalition partner, things would have been different. I would not say that MMS benefited from the scams but then again he is more of a front to the matriarch of the Gandhi family.