Dr Atul Gawande is a man of many parts. A second-generation NRI, the Boston-based surgeon and Harvard professor is a MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' grant recipient and also now a very highly rated writer, published in many of America's leading magazines, including the New Yorker. His new book, Better: A Surgeon's Notes on Performance (review on next page), has been hailed as a masterpiece, winning rave reviews both in the US and UK. In an exclusive interview with Ashish Kumar Sen, he talks about his experiences working in India, and his impressions of Indian doctors.
You say you felt a need to write after you became a doctor. So, has writing helped you become a better doctor?
I definitely feel that writing (makes me) try to put myself in the shoes of other people. You can burn out in this profession, it can be a daily grind—it can lead you to start feeling like it is just one disease after another, rather than one person after another. Writing has been my way of stepping out of the daily grind long enough to see what's great about it, what's not so...
