If you are interested in medicine, yet being a doctor doesn’t appeal to you, or if you are falling short of the cut-off in NEET, a career in the ever growing Pharmaceutical sector could be a perfect choice for you. Read the article to find out more about it. 

Introduction

When the din of the world gives you a headache or when you come down with a cold? What about a toothache, or a fever? What does the doctor prescribe when energy levels sag, or when some organ decides to go into overdrive? Medicine, isn’t it? From North to South, East to West, from one corner of the world to another, it is in the nature of man to fall ill. But have you ever taken a moment to think about the pill you pop or syrup you drink to alleviate your discomfort? How is the pill made, who decides how it is made? Enter, the pharmacist who makes a career out of studying medicine, examining how drugs are conceived and created, and how they interact with each other, as well as the body. 

The pharmacist studies medicine, biology, ethics, chemistry besides being trained to face patients. If you are interested in medicine, yet the nomenclature of a doctor doesn’t appeal to you, or the late hours that a nurse must keep don’t agree with you, Pharmacy career is just for you. It allows both kinds of temperaments to flourish – the one interested in applied knowledge, and the one interested in research. You can either practice as a pharmacist, or invest in research. 

What is the scope of B. Pharmacy?

With a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of more than 15% over the last five years, the Indian Pharma industry has significant growth opportunities. Pharmacists represent the third largest health care professions in the world after Nursing and Doctors. So, there is immense scope for Pharmacy graduates to make a career in this field. 

What you’ll learn in B. Pharmacy? 

Pharmacy education in India is primarily  focused on the basic sciences. 

In B. Pharmacy you will learn all about medicines, chemicals, their effects and uses, and how to manage and dispense them. You will study what effects drugs have on human body, the origin of these drugs, the process of preparation of medicines and practices followed for quality check during the manufacture of medicines. You will also need to keep yourself updates with the new drugs that enter the market. 

The B. Pharmacy course covers a comprehensive range of major and minor subjects like Human Anatomy & Physiology, Pharmaceutical Chemistry, Pharmaceutics, Pharmacology, Pharmacognosy, Biochemistry and Pharmaceutical Engineering and Technology. Minor subjects may include, Hospital Pharmacy, Clinical Pharmacy, Immunology, Marketing & Business Management, Computer Applications, Pharmaceutical Engineering, Mathematics, Statistics, and Pharmaceutical Biotechnology, Computational Chemistry and / or minor projects and industrial training.

Skills you should focus on developing while pursuing B.Pharmacy

Remember companies look for specific skills before they offer you an offer letter. So, along with good academic records, a good Pharmacist should also have a scientific bent of mind, good communication skills, friendly disposition, research and scientific acumen. 

What job can you get?

An obvious career choice for pharmacy graduates is in the industry, either as sales and marketing executive or in quality control departments of the pharmaceutical units. One can also work as a drug inspector, drug controller or as a hospital pharmacist. 

However, with the advent of technology the role of Pharmacists is undergoing changes. The new age pharmacy jobs require computational  and management skills along with subject knowledge. Jobs as big data scientists, computational pharmacist scientist and life cycle management scientist have started emerging. 

Contribution to the society!

Your primary contribution to the society is creating new drugs, and improving old ones to prevent and fight disease. Every year millions in the country die from lack of affordable drugs, or diseases to which cure has yet not been found. As a pharmacist you will be at the forefront of this battle against disease. Second, in a country where the medical sector is terribly understaffed, the pharmacist can help in reducing the pressure on emergency services, and contribute greatly to saving lives especially in places where access to quality medical care is a great challenge. 

Who among us has not travelled? In the world of today you will concede, not travelling, is an anomaly hardly anyone can afford. We travel to new places for study, work, and sometimes leisure. As an essential element of life we hardly devote any thought to the phenomenon of travelling, but rather plan the ends which must be achieved by it. But travel was not always such a benign act as it is today – a century ago the seemingly innocuous and natural act of traveling could make one liable for harsh social sanctions. More so if you were a woman. It would seriously diminish your reputation.

Travel and Caste Sanctions 

Travel was akin to murder for Hindus before the 20th century. Men like Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi were threatened with excommunication from their community if they dared to cross the sea. Well, Gandhi did what he had to do and the rest as they say is history. If such harsh social sanctions were imposed on upper caste, educated, wealthy Indian men for travel, what chance did Indian women stand in an orthodox patriarchal society? 

The prime reluctance for high class-educated Hindus to cross the “black waters” was the fear of encountering polluting impurities that could pollute their caste. However, for the minorities in India like Parsis, Muslims, Armenians and Indo - Portuguese the reluctance to travel was far less, aided in no small measure by their cultural ties to countries west of India. However, women from all faiths and communities found it equally difficult to set foot in the open, on their own, due to their gender and financial deprivation. But where there is a will there is a way: there were women who bucked the trend and made the impossible possible by daring to dream and travel.

The following narratives tell compelling tales of courage, passion and adventure in women who turned their noses up to  patriarchy and a life of confinement. 

Pandita Ramabai (1858 - 1922)

Transgression could be her second name! Marrying a Bengali ‘lower caste’ man was the first in the line of many subversions this Maharashtrian Brahmin woman embraced all her life. In 1883, the year when most men fretted the idea of leaving shores, Ramabai packed her bags and left for England to study medicine. She practiced subversion and dissent all her life and made a profound statement for the emancipation of women. 

Cornelia Sorabjee (1866 – 1954)

If Oxford university was obstinate, Cornelia was headstrong! She went to England and appealed for an admission.  She didn’t give in till the famous university shunned its prejudice and granted admission to her. Hence Cornelia became the first ever woman to study law at Oxford. 

Atiya Fyzee (1877-1967)

Atiya did what very few women of her faith did at the time. She travelled. She travelled alone and unveiled! A scholarship took her to the very heart of the empire - London. Atiya was besotted by English fashion, the streets of London, English education and most things British. Her confidence in herself remained unflagged. She was an inspiration to thousands of her tehzibi sisters who vicariously experienced a sense of freedom and adventure through her perky  travel accounts. 

European Women in India

Circumstances weren't any better for European women. Travel was largely a male bastion. Only wealthy women with no prospects of marriage could travel. Travel was believed to violate women’s chastity and innocence which could make them unsuitable for their traditional role of the ‘angel in the house’. After the European colonial expansion when more men started taking employment in the colonies as civil servants, military men etc. women started traveling with them as wives, daughters and mothers. 

In India these women were confined to homes and their interactions with the natives were only limited to servants. They were prohibited from venturing out and mingling with the local population. After the defeat of Tipu Sultan in 1799, British snobbery and colonial superiority spiked and William Dalrymple’s world of ‘White Mughals’ faded where the British in India would slip in to native clothes, smoke the hookah and take a native wife. A strict patrolling of racial boundaries came into place that prohibited these women from intermingling with the natives. But then some of them punctured these boundaries. 

Fanny Parkes (1794 - 1875)

Her race and ethnicity never came in the way of fulfilling the wanderlust of this fiesty woman! Fanny Parkes spent 24 years in India between 1822 and 1846 and remained an Indophile all her life. She refused to be another sulking white memsahib in India. Leaving behind her husband to fulfill her wanderlust, she travelled alone extensively in North India on horseback, in boats and palanquins, befriending locals in the process. She was fluent in Persian, Urdu and Hindustani and became an ardent critic of the British Raj in India. After spending the most exciting part of her life in India, she was bored and disenchanted with life in England after her return. She spent the rest of her life writing lively accounts of her travels describing her fascination with the local customs, people, the natural beauty of Delhi and Banaras.

Emily Eden (1797 - 1869)

Emily Eden was the sister of George Eden, the Governor-General of India between 1835-1842. Unlike Fanny Parkes, she travelled in great comfort and luxury  with a huge entourage of servants, cooks, coolies, and elephants and horses. She met and mingled with the Kings and Queens and the other elite of India. Unlike Fanny Parkes, Emily Eden despised most things Indians. Her class consciousness and colonial superiority stood in the way of her perception of India apparent from her rather snooty account of her travel. Nonetheless she should be commended for traversing difficult terrains and discovering India beyond its heat and dust.

I believe travel is never a matter of money but of courage. These phenomenal women showed extraordinary courage and paved the way for  modern women to seek more, expect more and not let age old shackles hinder their personal and physical journeys. 

The author of this article Richa Singh is a content writer with Investronaut. She is an avid reader and a keen traveller.

There is a thin line between finding genetic differences amongst individuals (this primarily includes the research on human diversity) and constructing these genetic differences across groups (this involves our biased categorisation of the human population on basis of their colour, the shape of eyes, etc.) by making conscious choices!

“The undeniable truth is ‘Race’ does not exist biologically; human genetics does!”

In simple words, race is a social construct without any biological meaning. The differentiation categorised as “Race” does not exist in nature, it is created by human choice!

Before we proceed, let us look at how the clinical predictions based on race are wrongly used.

Across the world today, skin colour is highly variable. The study on genetics is greatly influenced by race which differentiates people as “white” and “black”. It is strongly believed that the “whites” are resistant to a few diseases which are prominent in the “blacks”. And that the “blacks” are stronger when it comes to few ancestral adaptations that make them prone to few major diseases found in the “whites”. 

The British Chinese people are known to have a higher rates of asthma. As for sickle cell, it is rare in white Americans. Similarly, cystic fibrosis is under-diagnosed in people of African ancestry because it is thought of as a ‘white’ disease. Diabetes has become an epidemic in South Asia. Hypertension, persistently high blood pressure, is strongly associated with being black according to research in the US and the UK. 

Now, for our better understanding, let us segregate and tackle the above-stated conditions understandably and smartly. 

The colour variation which is a foundation for the concept of race is just a natural adaptation. The difference in the skin tone closely correlates with latitudes. Scorching sunlight near the equator makes dark skin a useful shield against the ultraviolet radiation; towards the poles, where the problem is little sunlight, paler skin promotes the production of vitamin D. 

The mere assumption that every British Chinese patient will be predisposed to asthma cannot be the right way to diagnose or treat a health condition. Each person is different from the next. While sickle cell anaemia is rare in white Americans, it does not have a direct correlation to skin colour or ethnicity. Instead, it is related to malaria. Those with the sickle cell mutation enjoy some protection against that disease but its also true that it’s found in people of all complexions with roots in regions of the world in which malaria is common. Proceeding to diabetes, it is an adverse side effect of unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyles due to unprecedented economic growth in millions of Indian families. Living in an urban environment is associated with higher blood pressure with the most significant risk factor being high usage of salt. Most of the population facing higher blood pressure belongs to the US and the UK and is “white”. It is because their diets have traditionally been lower in fruit and vegetables and higher in fatty meat and salt. 

The framing of race as an essential genetic variable dominates the biomedical landscape. It is so woven into medical frames of understanding that it’s assumed to be the main player when it comes to rationalising racial differences! 

But it's unfair to choose somebody's race as a clinical prediction and conclude as to how different races respond in different ways to drugs and medical procedures!  Few effective drugs that do wonders in one race can be completely ineffective in another. 

Then, what when the racial concept is thrown out? What other variables should be considered in the study of ‘Race Science’? 

The research has come to a stage where it can be stated openly that under clinical settings, the heterogeneous nature of racial groups is questionable. So, despite the widespread use of race in scientific research, it is now the most controversial tool for making sense of human diversity. 

Further studies related to human genetics should use concepts like ancestry instead of the race.  Ancestry is a process-based concept that helps us understand the admixing events that lead to one’s existence. It’s also a statement about an individual's relationship to other individuals in their genealogical history. Thus, it is a very personal understanding of one's genomic heritage. 

In the past decade, the ability to sequence DNA from tumour tissue has fuelled major advances in how cancer is treated, ushering in an era of medicine known as precision oncology, in which doctors use genetic data to match cancer patients to drugs that target the specific cell mutations underlying their disease. This major advancement in the research was possible only when the study of “ancestry” was opted over “race”!  Moving ahead, someday the field of human genetic research might become independent of the race.

The voice behind this article is Ashwini Gaikwad, Content Writer, Investronaut. 

Architecture as an expression of culture 

One thinks of ‘Culture’ usually in terms of lived practices like food, language, dress, and rituals.  Architecture is rarely thought to be a part of culture even though it is an integral part of culture; some might even say it is an expression of it, and rightly so. We do understand the relation clearly between the two in respect to religious buildings – the minaret of the masjid, the spire of a church, the dome of a Gurdwara or the sanctorum of a temple, are clear enough examples. Culture draws from architecture, inasmuch as architecture draws from culture. The question is how? What relations can be drawn? 

Culture and Lifestyle 

What comes first? Culture or architecture? This is a chicken and hen question – circles have no beginnings! The way we experience life, we shape the worlds around us accordingly. The way we shape the worlds around us, we live our lives accordingly. 

Consider it this way: In Mumbai, low cost housing is almost an impossibility in a city where population exceeds land by a far mile. One solution was creation of low cost Chawl rooms in Mumbai – large buildings with one room apartments called Kholi. A typical Mumbai Chawl is designed as a building of multiple floors, each accessed by a central staircase which opens into a long passage that runs the length of each floor. The passage is open on one side, and on the other side a row of doors opens into tenements. The passage then serves as a balcony, where people can socialize, stand and get fresh air and sun. This unique design creates its own culture. Since doors can’t be closed during the day, as it will encourage gossip, privacy is impossible. In its place rises a very closely knit community where ‘Know thy neighbour’ is practiced in the truest and most literal sense. In a residential society with separate apartments, this bonhomie is impossible, and accordingly privacy is maintained at the expense of an individualistic culture. 

Kashmiri Da’eb

Similarly, in urban Kashmir, an appendage was constructed with houses keeping in mind gender roles and cultural norms. Houses typically were built with a Da'eb or a specially designed verandah. 

Has architecture anything to do with politics?

All fine and good, but one important question is: Has architecture anything to do with politics? You might be forgiven for thinking the answer is no! Not so! Architecture is deeply determined by politics. Historically, architecture has been defined by the tilt of those who are in power. For example, Mughals brought in a new style of architecture, which was a symmetrical and decorative blend of Persian, Turkish, and Indian architecture. This style differs from earlier styles by including large spherical domes, slender minarets at the corners, large halls, vaulted gateways, and exquisite delicate ornamentation. Buildings of importance like Red Fort, from the rampart of which governance was extended was built in this style reminding people of the association between power and place. 

Similarly, when the British conquered India, they abandoned the Mughal architecture and favoured the Italian gothic style leading to what is called Indo-Saracenic architecture. Victoria Memorial, for example, was built as a symbol of British power, a means to inspire awe. Lord Curzon summed it best: "Let us, therefore, have a building, stately, spacious, monumental and grand, to which every newcomer in Calcutta will turn, to which all the resident population, European and Native, will flock, where all classes will learn the lessons of history, and see revived before their eyes the marvels of the past." To prove, the overarching effects of colonialism, the country’s highest court: The Supreme court was designed in the Indo-British style. The impact of British policies was too deep to be shaken off lightly.        

The author of this article Richa Singh is a Content Writer with Investronaut. She is a keen traveller and an avid reader.