and commerce, political pressures, and the inequitable distribution of human

knowledge has overrun the garden of medicine. Ironically, human society continues
to judge the men who tend the garden with the gentle and caring yardsticks of yore
- the gardens which Sushruta of Kashi had laid in 600 BC, and which Jivaka of
Magadha and Hippocrates of the island of Cos in 429 BC had activated.
Elucidating these myriad complexities that tend medicine's journey over the last
hundred years, these seven stories, picked from the best penned in Hindi
literature, portray diverse dimensions of medical practice. They tell of the
divinity that Dr Chadha loses (and later rediscovers) in the story 'Mantra; of 'A
Hundred Lamps' that Dr Prashant lights in the hamlets of rural Bihar as, against
all odds, he wins the hearts of people; of a corrupt modern-day bureaucracy in free
India that throtdes the pleas of Dr Dinesh Manohar Wakankar, who is deeply
committed to the well being of his people in 'Vande Mataram'; of an 'Inquest' into
the ailing dehumanised system that rules the day-to-day administration of public
hospitals and tertiary healthcare institutions in the country; of the calming
influence and counselling of a physician in 'Birds', reminiscent of the traditional
role a family physician used to exercise; of an ideal therapeutic system,
'Alloveda', which combines the modern scientific temper of allopathy with the
goodness and nobility of ancient Ayurveda; of the psychosocial dilemma of an
infertile couple in a social order cursed by macho men, and the traumatic identity
ramifications of assisted reproductive technology in "The Doppelganger', where the
protagonist, despite becoming a grandfather, continues to be haunted by what he had
gone through years ago as a young man.
These stories dig deep into the recesses of medicine. They reflect upon the
dutifulness and devotion expected of a physician (a la