India keeps a single time zone for the whole country, five and a half hours ahead of Greenwich, and it does not change its clocks in summer. Most of the United States does. Since 2007, American clocks have moved forward on the second Sunday of March and back on the first Sunday of November, and on each of those mornings the distance between an American kitchen and a Punjabi one changes by an hour without anyone in Punjab having done anything at all. So the gap between Little Rock and Amritsar is eleven and a half hours in the American winter and ten and a half in the summer, and between Fresno and Amritsar it is thirteen and a half or twelve and a half.
The half hour is the cruel part. A difference of whole hours can be worked out in the head while doing something else. A half hour has to be thought about, and anyone who has made calls across that gap knows the small hesitation of counting forward, arriving at the half, and then wondering whether the clocks on this side changed last weekend.
The half hour, it turns out, is already present in Punjab before any call is made. Indian Standard Time is the mean solar time of a meridian at eighty-two and a half degrees east, which runs far to the east of Amritsar, near seventy-five. The sun therefore reaches its height over Amritsar, on average, about half an hour after the clocks there say noon. The time a city keeps is a convention agreed for the convenience of a nation, not a fact about the sky above it. A person calling home from California is reconciling two conventions, neither of which is quite the local sun.
The arithmetic produces a geography of its own, and it is less tidy than the usual story. The usual story says that evening on the American side is morning in Punjab, and often it is: a call made from California after dinner reaches into the next day, and the person who answers has a whole day in front of them while the person calling has a whole day behind. But a call made from California early in the morning reaches the Punjabi evening of the same date, and a call at a Californian lunchtime arrives after midnight. Not every call crosses into another date, and not every call joins a tired voice to a fresh one. What every call does is join two different parts of two different days. One voice may be reflective and the other brisk, one finishing and the other still making plans, and that asymmetry is built into the conversation before a word is spoken.
Two Rooms #
A call home has two rooms. There is the room in which you are speaking and the room you are trying to see. The line carries sound between them, and much of a conversation across that distance consists of supplying what sound cannot carry: the light in the other room at that hour, the weather outside it, the street beyond the gate, who else might be within earshot.
Sound carries more than it seems to. A line from a Punjabi house can bring, at the edges of a sentence, the whistle of a pressure cooker, a scooter’s horn in the lane, a loudspeaker carrying the early recitation from a gurdwara, a television in another room, a dog that has opinions about a passer-by. A physician’s ear, trained to notice how breath and voice sound, picks up other things: a hoarseness, a slowness, an unusual brightness that may be effort. Each is a fragment of evidence about the other room, and the mind, given fragments, does what it always does. It builds.
The building is where the trouble starts. The room the caller sees is assembled partly from what the line carries and partly from memory, and memory supplies a version of the room as it was when the caller last stood in it. The paint may have changed since then, the furniture moved, a tree cut down, a shop opened on the corner, and the people in the room have had all the ordinary changes of the intervening time. The caller’s room is a reconstruction with a date on it, and the date is older than the call. It is useful to know which parts of one’s picture of home are knowledge and which are inference, and the honest answer is usually that knowledge is a thin layer over a great deal of inference.
Jhumpa Lahiri wrote the most precise account I know of this double residence. In “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” from her first collection, Interpreter of Maladies (1999), a botanist from Dacca spends the autumn of 1971 in a New England university town, on a grant, while war engulfs East Pakistan. His wife and seven daughters are in Dacca, and for months he has no news of them. He dines most evenings with the family of the young narrator, Lilia, and watches the television news with them. Before he eats he takes out a pocket watch and keeps it set to the time in Dacca. The watch is the story’s quietest and best detail. He cannot call, cannot write with any hope of reply, cannot know; what he can do is keep the other room’s hour in his pocket, so that at any moment he knows what time it is where his family is, even though he does not know whether they are alive.
The watch is what remains of a call when the call is impossible: a reconstruction kept faithfully in the absence of any evidence. The child’s response is the other half of the story. Lilia, who barely understands the war, begins a private ritual on Mr. Pirzada’s behalf, a small nightly observance kept for the safety of people she has never met. When, long after he has returned home, word comes that his family is safe, the ritual ends, and the story closes on her understanding of what it means to miss someone across a distance of both miles and hours. Lahiri does not sentimentalise either the watch or the ritual. Both are what people do when the line cannot carry anything, and both are a kind of love that has nowhere to go.
The Price of a Minute #
For most of the telephone’s history the price of a minute shaped everything a call could be. When the first commercial transatlantic telephone service opened between New York and London in January 1927, three minutes cost seventy-five dollars. Prices fell over the decades that followed, slowly and then steeply, but for a long time a call across an ocean remained an event that had to be planned and paid for.
In India, long-distance calls were for many years trunk calls, booked through an operator and sometimes waited for at length. The booking classes had names, and an urgent booking cost more than an ordinary one; the most expensive class was called, with a bureaucracy’s unexpected gift for poetry, a lightning call. Then, in the late 1980s and through the 1990s, the booths marked STD, ISD and PCO spread across the country, standing for subscriber trunk dialling, international subscriber dialling and public call office. They brought direct long-distance calling within reach of people who had no telephone at home, and they made the cost of a call visible. A meter counted up the charge as one talked, in plain sight of the caller and often of the person waiting outside for the booth.
In the United States, prepaid phone cards, which the Federal Trade Commission dates to 1992, became an ordinary way to call distant countries cheaply. They were sold in convenience stores and at gas station counters, and the minutes promised on a card and the minutes it delivered were not always the same number; the Commission’s advice to buyers included looking out for surcharges, monthly fees and per-call access charges. Then, as the 2000s went on, calls began to move onto the internet, and for many people the price of a minute fell from something a household budgeted to something nobody measured at all.
That fall was real, and it was uneven, and the unevenness deserves precision. A call over the internet is free only to someone who already has a device, a connection, electricity at the right moment and the knowledge of how to use the application, or someone nearby who has. For many older people the landline remained the telephone long after their grandchildren had stopped using one. Connections in small towns and villages improved at a different pace from connections in cities. The free call also brought a new kind of cost: the frozen face, the voice that arrives a second late, the conversation spent asking whether the other person can hear. The minute stopped costing money and started costing patience.
Expensive minutes made calls into summaries. News was saved up for the call and delivered efficiently, and the important questions were asked first, in case the line dropped or the card ran out. Anyone who lived through that era of long-distance family life will remember the particular density of those conversations, and the sense that silence was being paid for by the second. The meter in the booth was a clock of its own, running beside the other two, and it was the one that set the pace.
The Ghosts’ Inventions #
Before the call there was the letter, and the most unsettling thing ever written about letters comes from Franz Kafka, who wrote a great many of them. In one of his late letters to Milena Jesenská, in the early 1920s, he set out a theory of correspondence that reads at first like a joke and then less like one. Writing letters, he said, is a traffic with ghosts, not only the ghost of the person addressed but one’s own ghost, which forms under the hand as one writes. Written kisses do not arrive where they are sent; the ghosts drink them on the way. Humanity, sensing this, has tried to abolish the ghostly element between people by inventing the railway, the motor car and the aeroplane, which bring bodies together. But the ghosts, Kafka went on, are calmer and stronger, and after the post they invented the telegraph, the telephone and the wireless. His conclusion, in paraphrase: the ghosts will not starve, but we will perish.
It is a strange thing to set beside a phone call home, and a useful one. Kafka places the telephone among the ghosts’ inventions, not humanity’s. A device that carries the voice without the body does not close the distance between two people; it changes the distance into something harder to see. A letter at least announced its gap. Everyone knew it had taken a week or a month to arrive, and that the news in it was old. A call feels like presence and is not. It delivers a voice in real time and leaves out everything a voice comes with in a room: the face, the hands, the way someone is sitting, whether they have eaten.
A physician hears Kafka’s point in professional terms. A telephone call is a history without an examination. Medicine has always known that what people say about themselves is the most important information there is, and also that it is incomplete, shaped by what they notice, what they fear, what they think the listener wants. In a clinic the examination is there to check the history against the body. On a call home there is no examination, and the voice, however clear, has been through the same ghostly passage Kafka describes. It is a version of the person, composed, as all speech is, for the listener.
None of this makes calls worse than letters, and Kafka, who could be wonderfully gloomy, may have been unfair to both. But his theory explains something that the falling price of a minute did not change. The distance a call crosses is not only physical. Some of it is the distance between a person and the version of himself that he offers down a line, and no technology has yet removed it.
The Chithi #
Punjab has a long history of people writing home and waiting for word. Men from Punjab served in the British Indian Army in large numbers, and in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries Punjabis went abroad as soldiers, labourers and settlers, to Southeast Asia, East Africa, Canada and the Pacific coast of the United States. Behind every departure was a house waiting for a ਚਿੱਠੀ, chiṭṭhī, a letter. The word is plain and domestic, and it carries in Punjabi song a weight that the English word rarely does.
The folk songs of separation are full of it: songs of women whose husbands were away in service or abroad, waiting for the postman, counting the seasons since the last letter, wondering whether the man has forgotten them in a foreign country. The waiting in those songs is rarely passive. It has its own labour, its own seasons and its own complaint, and the letter, when it comes, is never quite enough.
The letter had a grammar of its own, and its opening is the most revealing part. A common way for a Punjabi letter to begin, after the salutations and the blessings, was to report that all was ਰਾਜ਼ੀ-ਖ਼ੁਸ਼ੀ, rāzī-khushī, well and content, at this end, and to ask the same for the people at the other. Rāzī came into Punjabi from Persian, where it carries a sense of being satisfied; khushī is gladness. The formula came first, before any news, and it was written whether or not it was true, because everyone understood it as a formula. That is what makes it interesting. The reassurance was built into the genre, and precisely because it was built in, it was not meant to deceive and seldom did. A reader knew to look past rāzī-khushī for the paragraph that followed, where the real news, if there was any, would be. The convention allowed a writer to say all is well without asserting it, and left the truth to the body of the letter.
A telephone call has no such formula, or rather its formula is indistinguishable from a report. ਠੀਕ ਹੈ, ṭhīk hai, it’s fine, said at the start of a call, may be a greeting or may be the news, and the listener cannot tell which from the words. The letter had separated the ritual reassurance from the information. The call fused them, and much of the difficulty of listening to a voice from far away lies in prising them apart again.
Hindi cinema gave the diaspora’s letter its anthem in 1986, with “Chitthi Aayi Hai,” sung by Pankaj Udhas in the film Naam, whose speaker, far from home, has received a letter from his homeland asking him to come back. The song’s force came from the letter’s peculiar properties, which a call does not share. A letter could be reread. It could be carried in a pocket for months, shown to others, kept in a box, read again in a different mood. It was composed, with time to choose words, and constrained: an aerogramme was a single sheet that folded into its own envelope, and nothing could be enclosed. The fixed space did to letters what the meter did to calls. It made them summaries.
Letters were also rarely private. In a village where not everyone could read or write, a letter might be written by a scribe and read aloud by whoever in the house was literate, or by a neighbour; professional letter-writers sat outside post offices across India for exactly this purpose. A letter home was often addressed, in effect, to a household, and composed with that audience in mind. The call inherited this too. A phone in the hall, or a booth in the market with someone waiting outside, made privacy a matter of lowered voices. The editing of news for distant listeners did not begin with the telephone. It is as old as the letter that knew it would be read aloud.
The Kind Edit #
The letter had already shown that the editing of distant news is older than any tariff, and the history of the telephone confirms it. What happened when the minutes became free is more revealing than the fall in price itself. The summaries did not entirely go away. Calls grew longer and looser and more frequent, and yet a certain editing survived the collapse in price, which suggests it had never been mainly about money. People still decide, on a long-distance call, how much of a difficult day belongs in it. They still weigh how much worry the other person could help carry from so far away, and whether telling them would only move the worry without moving any of the help.
That calculation has a logic worth taking seriously. Worry shared with someone who can act on it is divided. Worry shared with someone who cannot act on it may simply be doubled: now two people lie awake, and only one of them is in a position to do anything in the morning. Someone thousands of miles away, told of a problem they cannot touch, may suffer more from the knowledge than the person who has the problem, because the person who has it can at least do something about it. On that reasoning a measure of silence is not deception. It is an allocation of burden by a person who knows where the burden can be carried.
The reasoning is sound as far as it goes, and it goes further than it should. The editing is an act of love, and it is also a small loss. Protecting someone from concern can be the kindest thing available at a distance. It can also leave two people exchanging polished accounts of lives that feel far less orderly from the inside. The person receiving the call may be editing too. Distance can make each side feel like the guardian of the other’s peace, until the conversation becomes a careful exchange between people trying to be strong in opposite directions, each sparing the other the very news that might have let them help.
The edit runs in both directions, and the caller’s own version deserves as much scrutiny as the one that comes back down the line. A person living far from home also decides what to report about the new place: the hours, the bills, the winter, the loneliness of particular evenings, the small slights and the small successes. There is a pressure, often unspoken and sometimes self-imposed, to make a departure into a story that justified itself, and the call is where that story is told in instalments. A hard week can become, in the telling, a busy one. The picture of the new country formed at the other end is built from these instalments, and it can be as much a reconstruction as the caller’s picture of home, assembled from what was chosen for the telling.
The moral philosopher Sissela Bok, in Lying (1978), argued that small protective deceptions are judged far too leniently by the people who tell them, because they are judged from the teller’s side. Her most useful move was to insist on the perspective of the deceived: how the protective untruth looks to the person from whom the truth was withheld, when that person learns of it later, as people usually do. She gave particular attention to medicine, where the habit of shielding the sick from their own diagnoses was once routine, and she found most of its justifications wanting. A kind edit on a long-distance call is usually an omission rather than a lie, and Bok herself distinguished between them. But her test transfers. An omission that the other person would accept, on learning of it, as a reasonable kindness is one thing. An omission that would make them feel shut out of a life they thought they shared is another, and the person doing the omitting is badly placed to tell which is which.
I should be clear about the limits of what I am describing. This is a possibility, a pattern that the structure of distance makes likely, not a report on any family, and certainly not a law of migration. Families differ enormously in how much they say to each other at any distance; some say everything, some say little even across a kitchen table. Nor is every omission a failure of honesty. People are entitled to privacy, including from those who love them, and a grown person who chooses not to report every ache is exercising a right, not committing a fault. The question is never whether to edit. Everyone edits. The question is whether the editing still leaves room for the other person to ask, and to be answered truthfully when they do.
I do not think complete disclosure is the right answer to every call, and I do not think habitual reassurance is either. The right amount is a judgement made fresh each time, by people who cannot see each other’s faces, and that last condition matters more than it seems. In a room, the edit is checked by the body. Someone who says I’m fine while sitting badly is contradicted by the way they are sitting. On a call the sentence stands alone, and the listener must decide whether to accept it with nothing to check it against but the voice.
Weather and Other Unimportant News #
Beside the edited news there is the unedited ordinary, and I think it is the better part of most calls home. A meal, an errand, a visitor, the state of the weather: none of these is important, and that is their value. The anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski, writing in 1923, coined the phrase phatic communion for talk whose purpose is not to convey information but to create and maintain a bond: the greeting, the remark about the weather, the question whose answer nobody needs. Phatic talk is easily dismissed as small. Malinowski’s point was that it does essential work, establishing that the channel is open and that the people on either end of it are still in relation.
On a call home, ordinary talk does that and something more. It maintains shared context. A remark, in a Punjab January, that the fog was thick this morning, or in June that the heat is unbearable, is not really a weather report. Neither is news that the wheat is nearly ready, in the weeks before Vaisakhi, or that the paddy is in, in the autumn. Each says that the year is turning there as it always has, with or without the caller, which may be both the hardest and the most reassuring thing that distance has to say. And each keeps the caller’s picture of the other room current, adjusted a little, its date brought forward. A person who knows that the neighbour’s shop has changed hands and that the lane was dug up again for pipes can still be told a story about the neighbourhood and follow it. Shared context is perishable. Ordinary news is how it is kept fresh.
A physician listening to such news hears something further, and has to be careful with it. Appetite, sleep, whether someone walked to the market or sent for things, whether a visitor came and was received: these are the activities of daily life, which clinicians use to judge how a person is managing, carried in the form of gossip. A change in them can mean something. But a call home is not a review of systems, and a physician who turns every mention of a missed walk into a line of clinical questioning will soon find that the ordinary news stops coming. People do not want to be examined by telephone, and they are quick to notice when they are. The skill is to let the ordinary remain ordinary while staying awake to it, which is a harder discipline than either listening clinically or not listening at all.
Often the most comforting part of a call is that it contains no news. Nothing happened; the day was like other days; the weather was the weather. That is the sound of a world continuing, and it is what the caller most needs to hear, though he would rarely put it that way.
When the News Is Illness #
One particular edit deserves a physician’s wariness. News of illness tends to travel long distances late, and in its mildest version. A symptom that would be described in full to someone in the same house can become, over seven thousand miles, a small thing, nothing to worry about. The word minor does a great deal of work on international calls, and it deserves a little distrust when it has travelled that far. No one need be lying. Affection is simply a very efficient compressor.
When news of illness does enter a call, the first useful distinction is between what is known and what has been inferred. Someone may be repeating a clinician’s explanation, describing a symptom directly, or passing along what another relative understood from a conversation they were not fully part of. These are different kinds of information even when they arrive in the same reassuring sentence, and a physician hearing them should sort them before reacting to any of them. A diagnosis reported third-hand has passed through at least two mouths, and often between two languages as well, from a doctor’s English into a relative’s Punjabi summary; each crossing loses something.
Distance makes it tempting to respond by collecting more detail and taking charge. A physician in the family may feel that this is the most helpful role available, and sometimes the family expects it. But the person who is ill still has preferences about what is shared and who participates, and illness does not suspend them. A clinician on the spot has information the caller lacks: the examination, the results, the record, the history of previous visits, and a continuing relationship with the patient that will go on long after the call. The American Medical Association’s Code of Medical Ethics has long advised that physicians should generally not treat members of their own families, except in emergencies, in isolated settings where no one else is available, or for routine care of short-term minor problems, because emotional closeness compromises professional objectivity and family members may not speak freely to a relative. Across an ocean, without an examination or a licence where the patient lives, the case for restraint is stronger still.
Several practical questions can therefore matter before any interpretation is offered. Who is with the person who is ill? What explanation has already been given, and by whom? Is help being requested, and what kind? Would the person want assistance obtaining or understanding the relevant information, or would they rather the caller simply knew? When will someone next be able to give an update? These questions organise support without pretending that a telephone account supplies an examination. They also put the person who is ill back at the centre of the conversation about them, which a physician’s anxiety can easily displace.
There is also the question of whose news it is. Illness often travels through a family before it reaches the person abroad, and not always with the knowledge of the person who is ill. A physician hearing about a relative’s condition from someone else should ask, at least of himself, whether the patient knows the news is being passed on, and whether she would want a doctor in the family to have it, and in what detail. Kinship does not dissolve a person’s claim to decide who knows about her body. Sometimes the right response to a detailed account relayed by a third person is to say that one would be glad to help, if she would like that, and to let the request come from her.
There is a quieter temptation as well, which runs the other way. A physician hearing a worrying account at a distance can be tempted to reassure, to say that it sounds like nothing, because reassurance is what he would like to be true and what the call seems to request. That is an opinion without an examination too, and it can do as much harm as alarm, by making the family less inclined to go back to the doctor who can actually look. The honest position is usually narrower than either: I can’t tell from here; this is worth asking the doctor there about, and here is the question I would ask.
What a Call Can Carry #
Sometimes the most useful contribution is coordination rather than an opinion: helping to identify the right person to contact, making an agreed task easier, putting a question into words that a busy clinic will answer, remaining available for the conversation after the next appointment. Sometimes it is simply listening without requiring reassurance in return. The call cannot remove the distance. It can make the next piece of help more specific, less intrusive and more closely connected to what the person actually wants.
It helps to be exact about the kinds of work a call can and cannot do, because the vagueness of being there hides real differences. A call can carry listening, which is not nothing; to be heard by someone who knows you is a real good, even when nothing is solved. It can carry practical coordination: arranging, reminding, finding, explaining. It cannot carry hands. It cannot drive anyone to the hospital, sit beside a bed, fetch medicine from the chemist in the evening, sit in the waiting room so that the person who is ill does not wait alone. Those are done by the people who are there, and a caller’s gratitude to them is a part of the call’s work that is easy to forget.
Nor can a call carry decisions that need local judgement: whether a symptom needs to be seen tonight, whether a treatment should be changed, whether a person can manage at home. Those belong to the people in the room and the clinicians who can examine. A caller who tries to make them from a distance, however well-informed, is substituting a voice for a presence, which is exactly the confusion Kafka warned about.
Distance is not helplessness. It is a different shape of help, narrower in some ways and broader in others, since a person far away can sometimes see a pattern that those close by are too tired to notice. The task is to know which shape one is in, and not to pretend to the other.
An Unfinished Version of the Day #
A good call does not have to solve the distance. It may simply make room for a less finished version of the day. A pause can be allowed to remain a pause, without anyone hurrying to fill it because silence once cost money and the habit of paying for it has outlived the bill. An ordinary question can be answered without the answer turning into a progress report. I don’t know yet can be said, about a symptom or a plan or a mood, and left standing.
The editing I have described, protective and isolating at once, is what happens when every call has to be a summary. The remedy is not to tell everything; it is to allow some calls to be unsummarised, uncertain, ordinary, interrupted by the pressure cooker and the dog. Home, in that sense, is partly the place where a life can be spoken in its unfinished form, and a good call carries a little of that permission across the water. Kafka’s ghosts take their share of every message. What they cannot take is the willingness, on both ends, to call again tomorrow and say the rest.
So a call home can carry a voice, ordinary news, a fair amount of practical help, some listening, and the knowledge that the line is open. It cannot carry hands, an examination, or a judgement that belongs to the people in the room. It cannot remove the distance between a person and the version of himself he offers down a line, though it can reduce it, a little, each time someone declines to make that version tidier than the truth.
Then it is over, at whatever hour it is on each side. One person goes to bed, or begins the day, or returns to the kitchen; the other does something else, in a different light. The call ended at the same instant in both rooms, and that instant may be the only part of it the two rooms shared exactly.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography: upbringing in Amritsar; training in Little Rock (2007–2008) and Fresno (2008–2010); practice in California since 2010. Indian Standard Time at UTC+05:30, a single national time zone without daylight saving time, based on the meridian at 82.5° E: standard reference knowledge; the United States daylight-saving schedule in force since 2007 (second Sunday in March to first Sunday in November): well-established; the resulting differences from Central and Pacific time, the roughly half-hour lag of Amritsar’s mean solar noon behind clock noon (from its longitude near 74.9° E), and the great-circle distance of roughly 7,600 miles from Amritsar to Fresno are the author’s arithmetic. The first commercial transatlantic telephone service, opened by AT&T between New York and London in January 1927 at $75 for three minutes: standard telecommunications history. Trunk calls, urgent and lightning booking classes, and the STD, ISD and PCO booths of the late 1980s and 1990s in India; aerogrammes; professional letter-writers outside Indian post offices; Punjabi military service and early twentieth-century emigration: well-established general history. Prepaid phone cards introduced in the United States in 1992, and the FTC’s consumer advice about surcharges, monthly fees and per-call access charges: Federal Trade Commission consumer guidance. Sissela Bok, Lying: Moral Choice in Public and Private Life (1978), on judging protective deception from the perspective of the deceived and on deception in medicine: paraphrased from well-established knowledge. The Punjabi letter opening ਰਾਜ਼ੀ-ਖ਼ੁਸ਼ੀ (rāzī-khushī) and the phrase ਠੀਕ ਹੈ (ṭhīk hai): standard usage, described as a common convention rather than a universal one. Bronisław Malinowski’s term “phatic communion” (1923): standard reference. AMA Code of Medical Ethics guidance on physicians treating members of their own families: described in general terms from well-established knowledge; Literary sources: Franz Kafka’s letters to Milena Jesenská (early 1920s), paraphrased; Jhumpa Lahiri, “When Mr. Pirzada Came to Dine,” Interpreter of Maladies (1999), described without quotation; the song “Chitthi Aayi Hai” from the film Naam (1986). Facts not linked above rest on standard reference knowledge. Vendor representations. None. No calling-card company, telephone company or calling application is named or assessed.
Recollection and tradition. The author’s places and dates are his published biography. No particular call, relative, conversation, device, calling habit or frequency of calls is described, and no family member speaks or acts in the essay. The sounds that may be heard on a line from a Punjabi house, the remarks about fog, heat, harvests and “a small thing,” and the questions suggested for news of illness are general examples, not recollections or quotations from anyone. The opening formula of Punjabi letters is described as a common literary and social convention, not as the practice of any particular family, and the folk songs of waiting are described in general terms.
Analysis and forecast. The view that the editing of long-distance calls survived the fall in their price, the reading of Kafka’s ghosts, of Lahiri’s pocket watch and of the letter’s formula of reassurance, the application of Bok’s perspective of the deceived to omissions, the account of ordinary news as shared context, the wariness about minimised news of illness, and the distinctions among the kinds of help a call can carry are the author’s present-day interpretation as of November 6, 2026. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer. It is personal reflection, not medical advice; readers seeking care should contact their own physician’s office.
About the Author #
Kanwar Partap Singh Gill, MD, traces his family roots to Khadur Sahib in Punjab’s Majha region and grew up in Amritsar. He attended Spring Dale School and completed pre-medical studies at Khalsa College in 1994–1996. He earned his MBBS from Sri Guru Ram Das Institute of Medical Sciences and Research in Amritsar in 2002.
He completed PGY-1 at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences in Little Rock in 2007–2008, and PGY-2 and PGY-3 with UCSF Fresno at Community Regional Medical Center from 2008 through 2010. He has practiced medicine in California since 2010.
His career has crossed four distinct information eras: predominantly paper-based medicine, early and fragmented electronic records, the integrated-EHR era, and the emerging age of generative and agentic artificial intelligence.