A third year student of the Integrated Program in Management (IPM) at IIM-Indore, Jasmine Kaur is a vociferous feminist, passionate Punjabi, and a published poet. She loves reading, debating, cogitating, eating butter chicken, writing and Pink Floyd …not necessarily in that order. Her frequent bouts of rumination along with her penchant for spotting the hypocrisies and paradoxes of human life give her writing an inimitable edge, which only gets better with her tongue-in-cheek humor. She has a lot to say, and a hell of a way to say it!
The shocking tale of how the drug industry lets millions die every year, as told in the documentary film "Fire in the Blood".
"If it is true that one death is a tragedy, and thousands of deaths is a statistic, then this film is about those statistics." This is how the film begins, and with every passing frame you come to realize the gravity of those appalling statistics. Statistics, whose numbers could have been controlled, but were not. Statistics that have come to define the "Corporate Crime of the Century", as director Dylan Mohan Grey calls it.
The documentary is essentially a shocking exposé of how pharmaceutical companies use patent law to keep profits unconscionably high even at the cost of peoples' lives.
Simply by virtue of being a woman (something that we can't exactly control) we often find ourselves at the receiving end of crass comments and discourteous behavior. But for some unfathomable reason, more often than not we just let it pass. Remaining quiet and complacent are perhaps the two most self-destructive behavioral issues that we have as women.
As a student of management, I learn (or try to) the rather beguiling art and science of how to be in charge of, or 'manage' things. It is a rather curious subject really, this thing we call management. In fact, we are all self-professed experts on the subject, especially out here in India. We all think that we can manage everything, but can we really? Can we really manage a country of over 1.2 billion people, with an uncountable number of disparate sensibilities? Can we really manage all that? Well, one man thinks he can. That man is none other than Narendra Modi.
Don't go near them; don't you dare!
So, yes, I was finally coming home. It had been a long time. A really long time. 3 months, to be precise. That's almost a year by Punjabi family standards. My dad sends me "I miss you beta" texts when I go down to get a band-aid from the shop across the road. So yeah, it's kind of a big deal when I go 577 miles away. For 3 months. One whole term. Oh, the tragedy. Their little girl living in a college campus all by herself. "Haay, mera sher puttar ". If you had looked into their almost-teary, angst-ridden eyes on the first day of college, you would think I was crossing the seven seas to fight a brave battle with the Spartans on the other side.