Anyone who has waited at an official window knows the arrangement, even if the details differ from one country to another. There is a pane of glass, a shallow tray or slot beneath it, often a microphone, and a number called in its turn. Banks, passport offices and licensing counters use much the same furniture. What sets some windows apart is the amount of future that queues in front of them. A person arrives carrying a folder, and in the folder, arranged and rearranged, is the paper version of a life. On the other side sits someone whose work is to understand enough of that life, in a short time, to reach a decision about it.
This essay is about no particular office, country or applicant. I am interested in the window as a form: the place where a complicated human story is asked to become brief and legible, and where two people, unequally placed, meet for a little while across a sheet of glass. Many people know such windows, at passport offices, licensing boards and registries of every kind, and most of us will stand at several in a lifetime. I want to ask what the window can know of a life, what it is reasonable for it to ask, and what each person at the glass owes the other when the stakes on the two sides are so different. I will not describe any interview, and I will make no claims about the rules of any particular process. The questions I care about are older than any of those rules.
The Folder #
A folder can look remarkably calm. Its pages are squared at the edges, its certificates sleeved, its copies ordered so that whatever is asked for can be produced without a search. Preparation of that kind is a form of care, and I do not think dignity requires treating paperwork as beneath a person. Documents are how strangers manage to trust one another at all. A system that took everyone’s word for everything would not be kinder. It would only be arbitrary in a different way, rewarding the fluent, the confident and the well connected, and leaving everyone else to the mercy of a stranger’s impression.
The word for the place where such papers are kept carries its own history. In Punjabi, as in Hindi and Urdu, an office is a ਦਫ਼ਤਰ, daftar, a word that came through Persian and Arabic from the Greek diphthera, a prepared hide, the skin on which things were written. The office is named after its writing material. That is not a bad description of what an office is. Max Weber, whose account of bureaucracy in Economy and Society remains the starting point for most serious thinking about it, listed among its defining features that modern administration is conducted on the basis of written documents, the files, which outlast the officials who handle them. A person at a window is dealing with an institution that remembers in paper, decides on paper, and will account for itself, if it ever has to, by producing paper.
What can paper establish? More than its critics allow and less than an anxious applicant hopes. It is good at identity: who a person is, where and when they were born, what name they have carried. It is good at completed events: an examination passed, a degree conferred, a post held from one date to another. It is weaker on context, on the circumstances that make a completed event mean one thing rather than another, and it is weakest of all on the future, on what a person intends and will do. Different decisions require different mixtures of these kinds of evidence, and I am not describing the mixture any real office requires. The general point is only that a document has a bounded meaning. A degree certificate supports a claim about education. It is not evidence of character, or of skill on a given afternoon, or of what its holder will do next year, and an honest reader does not ask it to be.
What the Pages Leave Out #
Still, a document is a peculiar kind of evidence. A degree certificate records that examinations were passed. It does not record the years of evenings that went into passing them, the people who made those evenings possible, or what the evenings cost. It shows the result and conceals the effort, and it is supposed to; that is what makes it portable. A certificate that tried to carry every hour of work, every uncertainty and every relationship behind it would be useless as evidence. No one could read it, check it or compare it with another. Its silence about effort is the price of its being believed.
There is a further argument for that silence which is easy to overlook from the applicant’s side of the glass. A window that demanded the whole life would be intrusive in a way that no free person should welcome. The narrowness of a form is, among other things, a limit on what the institution is entitled to know. When a document records only the examination and not the evenings, it protects the evenings. Privacy is partly a matter of what the official world is not allowed to ask.
The person holding the folder knows everything the pages leave out. The person reading them knows only what the pages say. Both positions are reasonable, and the distance between them is the whole subject of the window.
Anyone who has assembled such a folder will recognise the temptation to put in more than was requested: one more letter, one more copy, a page that might conceivably be asked about. Franz Kafka, who understood offices as well as any writer has, put that temptation into a single sentence of his parable “Before the Law.” A man from the country comes to the door of the Law and is told by the doorkeeper that he cannot enter now. He waits, for days and then for years. He had equipped himself with many things for the road, Kafka writes, and he uses all of it, however valuable, in attempts to bribe the doorkeeper. The doorkeeper accepts everything, but says as he does so, in paraphrase: I take it only so that you will not think you have left anything undone.
Nothing in a well-prepared folder is a bribe, and I do not mean the comparison that way. But the doorkeeper’s reply reaches beyond bribery. It is one of the cruellest and most exact things ever written about bureaucracy, and it is also, strangely, not unkind. The doorkeeper sees what the offerings are for. They are not evidence. They are the applicant’s way of being able to tell himself, afterward, that he did everything. The doorkeeper grants him that, and nothing else. Most extra pages in most folders do the same work. They are seldom needed by the reader. They are a way of bringing more of oneself to the counter than the counter has room for, and of carrying out of the building the knowledge that nothing was neglected. I do not think that need is foolish. It is the ordinary dignity of someone who has prepared. But it is worth knowing which reader the extra pages are really for.
Glass, Tray, Number #
The furniture of the window repays closer attention than it usually gets, because none of it is neutral. Each piece was installed for practical reasons, and each also shapes what kind of encounter can take place.
The glass lets each person see the other and prevents them from touching. It protects the official, from anger and desperation as well as from anything worse, and it protects the applicant in a less obvious way, from informality: there will be no hand on the shoulder, no word in private, no sense that this particular case is being handled as a favour. The glass makes the encounter slightly public, and publicity of that kind is a modest guarantee. It also makes certain kinds of warmth impossible, and the applicant feels that loss more sharply than the official does.
The tray is the only shared territory. Papers cross in it, first in one direction and then, some of them, in the other. The hands never meet. Applicants quickly learn to slide documents through in the order they will be wanted, face up, the right way round, and there is an etiquette to the tray as exact as any etiquette of the table. What comes back through it may be a single slip of paper, and on that slip a year may depend.
The microphone, where there is one, alters both voices a little. It flattens the tones in which hesitation and courtesy are usually carried, and it makes intimacy impossible. The applicant may hear the official clearly and still worry whether his own voice is coming through, whether the word he chose was heard as he meant it.
And the number, called in its turn, is the most democratic object in the room. Whoever you are at home, here you are a letter and two digits. There is a real dignity in that anonymity, which refuses to rank people by name or family, and there is also a chill, because a number is not someone who can be recognised.
Above all, the window is a place of waiting. The applicant’s experience of it is mostly the hours before the conversation, not the conversation itself. In the 1970s the sociologist Barry Schwartz argued that waiting is distributed in societies along the lines of power: those with power make others wait, and are rarely made to wait themselves, so that whose time is spent is itself a measure of rank. Physicians should hear that argument without defensiveness. Patients wait for doctors far more often than doctors wait for patients, and a waiting room is an arrangement of time that tells everyone in it who is expected to adjust to whom. That asymmetry cannot always be avoided in a clinic or at a window. What can be avoided is pretending it is not there. A delay acknowledged, a decision made promptly, a short explanation of what happens next: these are the courtesies by which an institution admits that the time it has been spending was someone else’s.
Exactly as Large as the Question #
The window asks for short answers, and brevity is a discipline of its own. One must decide what belongs in an answer and trust that leaving the rest unsaid does not make the answer dishonest. For someone thinking about a whole future, that restraint can feel out of all proportion to the moment. A question takes a few seconds to ask. The honest answer, as the person answering experiences it, might take an evening.
Medicine has an old convention that I think about here. The chief complaint, the line at the head of a clinical history, is traditionally recorded in the patient’s own words, and it is meant to be short. Chest pain for two days. Can’t sleep. Behind each such phrase is a life that will not fit on one line, and every clinician learns that the brevity of the first sentence is no measure of what stands behind it. A good history begins by accepting the short version and then makes room for the long one. A window cannot always do the second part. That is not a failing of the people who work there. It is what a window is for.
There is a real ethical distinction buried in this, and it deserves to be stated carefully, because it is easily confused with something less admirable. A short answer can be truthful or it can be evasive, and the difference is not its length. An answer is truthful when it gives the questioner what the question actually asks for, accurately, and does not create a false impression by what it leaves out. It is evasive when it is shaped to avoid the point of the question while appearing to meet it. Philosophers of language have long observed that ordinary conversation runs on a tacit agreement to say as much as the exchange requires and no more, and that much deception lives not in false statements but in true ones arranged to mislead. The window depends on that agreement more heavily than most conversations do, because it has so little time to test it.
I am not offering advice about how to answer any official’s questions; that would be presumptuous, and the right course depends on rules I am not discussing. I am describing a virtue. Clinicians see its absence every day in a form that has nothing to do with officials. A patient asked how much he drinks will sometimes answer the question he fears rather than the one he was asked, and the answer, though not quite false, leads the history off course for months. A patient asked whether the pain is worse on exertion will sometimes tell the whole story of the week instead, because the story is what she needs to tell, and the answer to the question is somewhere inside it. Neither is dishonest. Both are human. And both show that answering the question actually asked is a skill, not a reflex.
What the person at the counter can do is give the short answer truthfully and let it stand. There is a dignity in that which is easy to overlook: the decision to be exactly as large as the question, no smaller and no larger, and to carry the rest of oneself out of the building intact.
Indifferent Questions #
Kafka’s parable is so often invoked as a shorthand for bureaucratic absurdity that its details are forgotten, and the details are where its intelligence lies. It was published in 1915, and Kafka also set it inside his novel The Trial, where a priest tells it to Josef K. in a darkened cathedral. The door of the Law stands open. The doorkeeper, in his fur coat, with his long thin Tartar beard, steps aside so that the man can look in, and laughs: if it tempts you so much, try going in despite my prohibition. But note that I am powerful. And I am only the lowest doorkeeper. From hall to hall there are others, each more powerful than the last.
The man decides to wait. The doorkeeper gives him a stool and lets him sit beside the door. Then comes the sentence that I think about whenever I stand at a counter of any kind. The doorkeeper often conducts little interrogations of the man; he asks him about his homeland and many other things, but they are, as the phrase is usually translated, indifferent questions, of the kind that great lords ask. The questions are real questions. They are asked. They even concern the man’s home. But nothing depends on the answers, and both of them know it.
That is the nightmare version of the window, and it is worth being precise about what makes it a nightmare. Questioning alone would be bearable. What makes it a nightmare is that the questions are disconnected from any decision, and that the decision itself never comes. The man grows old by the door. He studies the doorkeeper for so many years that he comes to know even the fleas in his fur collar, and in his second childhood he begs the fleas to help him change the doorkeeper’s mind. As his sight fails he perceives, in the darkness, a radiance streaming inextinguishably from the door of the Law. Dying, he asks why, in all these years, no one else has come seeking admittance. The doorkeeper bellows into his failing ear that no one else could be admitted here, because this entrance was meant only for him, and now he is going to shut it.
Kafka’s parable gets something right about windows that their defenders sometimes forget. For the applicant, a single official can come to occupy the whole visible world, and the questions asked across the glass can seem charged with meanings they do not carry. The man from the country forgets the other doorkeepers, Kafka says; this first one seems to him the only obstacle. Anyone who has rehearsed a short conversation for weeks knows how the person on the other side grows in the imagination into the embodiment of a whole system.
But it is worth noticing also what the parable describes that a working window, at its best, is designed to prevent. Kafka’s door has no published rules, no stated reasons, no end. The doorkeeper’s questions are idle because no criterion governs them. Much of the long history of modern administration, for all its failures, has been an attempt to make the questions at a window answerable to something outside the official’s mood: to stated requirements, to records, to a decision that is actually made and can be examined afterward. Kafka’s door is what an office becomes when that attempt fails completely. Most windows live somewhere between his door and the ideal, and it is the distance from his door, not from the ideal, that applicants feel first.
The Doorkeeper Is Also Kept #
It would be easy to turn the official into a symbol and leave him there. Accounts of these encounters tend to cast the person behind the glass as a gatekeeper or an obstacle, and the person in front of it as a petitioner or a hero. Kafka himself refuses that simplification, and he does so in the most unexpected place. After the priest has told the parable, he and K. argue about it for pages, and the priest offers readings that turn it inside out. Perhaps, the priest suggests, it is the doorkeeper who is deceived. The man is free; he can go wherever he wishes, and only the Law is closed to him. The doorkeeper is bound by his office to his post. He has never been inside. He knows nothing of the halls beyond except that their keepers are more powerful than he is. He is, the priest says, subordinate to the man he is refusing.
Kafka knew both sides of the glass. From 1908 until his retirement in 1922 he worked as a lawyer at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague, a semi-public body that assessed employers and dealt with the claims of men injured at work. He was by most accounts conscientious and good at it. One of his reports argued for a safer design of the cutting shaft on wood-planing machines, which were taking off workers’ fingers; a physician reading it now recognises the logic of prevention. His friend Max Brod later recalled Kafka remarking on how modest the injured workers were who came to the institute. Instead of storming the building and smashing it to pieces, they came to ask. The man who wrote the doorkeeper had spent his working days as a kind of doorkeeper, and he was not comfortable there.
The person receiving the documents occupies a role, with obligations of its own and a perspective that the applicant may know nothing about. For the applicant the conversation is singular, rehearsed in advance and remembered for years. For the officer it is one of a great many that day, each a little different and many of them alike. The officer has instructions, superiors, numbers to meet, and the knowledge that a mistake in either direction can be costly. Neither experience is the false one.
And yet Kafka does not let the priest’s ingenuity have the last word, and neither should we. When the priest concludes that one need not accept everything the doorkeeper says as true, only as necessary, K. answers with one of the bleakest sentences in the novel: that would make the lie into the order of the world. The sophisticated reading that rescues the doorkeeper’s dignity has, in the process, made the man’s death a matter of necessity. K. sees the cost of that rescue, and refuses to pay it.
This is the counterweight that any humane account of the window has to carry. Two people can behave courteously across a counter without occupying equivalent positions. One may turn to the next file when the conversation ends. The other may have to reorganise a year. Recognising the humanity of both participants should make that difference easier to describe, not harder. A sympathetic portrait of the official that quietly dissolves the asymmetry is not generosity. It is a way of not looking at power.
Without Anger or Partiality #
Weber had a phrase for the ideal official, borrowed from Tacitus: sine ira et studio, without anger and without partiality. The official, in his account, is meant to discharge his duties impersonally, without hatred and therefore without affection, treating like cases alike whoever the applicant happens to be. Weber was unsentimental about what this required. Bureaucracy, he argued, develops the more perfectly the more it is dehumanised, the more completely it eliminates love, hatred and every purely personal feeling from official business. He meant this as a description of its technical superiority, and he was also, elsewhere in his work, deeply uneasy about a world organised in that way.
It is tempting to read Weber’s impersonality as the coldness of the glass, and in part it is. But anyone who has grown up where personal connection decides a great deal will hear the other side of it at once. Punjabi, like Hindi and Urdu, has a word for the alternative to impersonal administration: ਸਿਫ਼ਾਰਸ਼, sifārish, a recommendation, a word put in, a connection that moves a file to the top of the pile. Where sifārish rules, the person with an uncle in the right office is served and the person without one waits. The pane of glass, the numbered ticket and the standard form are, in aspiration at least, the furniture of equality. They say that the applicant’s cousin does not matter. That is a cold message and also, for anyone without such a cousin, a protective one.
So the impersonality of the window is partly a moral achievement, whatever it costs in warmth, and the strongest argument against a sentimental view of these encounters is that warmth, at a window, is often the first symptom of favouritism. An official who is warm to some applicants is likely to be cool to others, and the others will not know why.
The difficulty is that impersonality is never complete, and pretending otherwise can hide the places where it fails. In Street-Level Bureaucracy, published in 1980, the political scientist Michael Lipsky studied the public workers who deal with citizens face to face: teachers, police officers, welfare caseworkers, the staff of courts and clinics. He argued that such workers inevitably exercise discretion, because rules never fully determine individual cases, and that under heavy caseloads and limited resources they develop routines and simplifications in order to cope. Those routines, he argued, in practice become the policy that citizens actually receive. The rules on paper are one thing; the policy at the window is what the person behind the glass can manage on a crowded afternoon.
Lipsky’s subject is structure rather than villainy, and structure seems to me the right level at which to direct criticism. A concern about unclear requirements, inconsistent treatment or inadequate explanation should be assessed on evidence about those features. It need not be turned into a story about an unkind individual, and courtesy need not be used to excuse it. An unequal encounter can be conducted with care while still remaining subject to questions about how its power is exercised. Indeed, the more courteously a process is conducted, the more important it becomes to ask those questions, because courtesy makes them easier to forget.
A Decision Is Not a Verdict #
The window gives a physical shape to a threshold, but the life approaching it was already in motion. Years of study and intention do not begin at the counter, and their meaning is larger than any one exchange, whichever way it goes. I think that is worth saying, because a single short conversation, precisely because it is short, can come to seem in memory like the hinge on which everything turned. Hinges matter. A door, though, is mostly door.
The great Urdu and Persian poet Mirza Ghalib knew more about petitioning than most poets. In the late 1820s he travelled the long road from Delhi to Calcutta, then the seat of the East India Company’s government, to press his claim to a family pension, and he spent many months there with his papers. The claim failed. The pension would trouble him, in one form or another, for much of his life, and anyone who reads his letters knows that money was never far from his mind. I do not want to make light of that; a pension decided by a distant office could determine how a household lived. But no one now reads Ghalib because of his file. The petition is a footnote to the ghazals. The decision was real, and it was not a verdict on the man.
People have a strong tendency to let one outcome judge years of preparation. Psychologists have described a version of it as outcome bias, the habit of evaluating a decision by how it turned out rather than by how well it was made with what was known at the time. At a window the bias works on the self. A refusal is felt as a judgement on the years that went into the folder; an approval is felt as a vindication of them. Both are mistakes of the same kind. The years were what they were before the conversation, and they remain so after it.
Physicians see a domestic version of this every day. A patient looks at a single laboratory number and hears in it a verdict on his character: the blood sugar as a grade, the cholesterol as a reproach, the weight on the scale as a moral report. Part of the work of a clinic is to separate the measurement from the judgement, to say, in effect, this number tells us something we need to know and act on, and it is not a description of who you are. That separation does not make the number unimportant. It makes it usable.
The same holds at the window, and I want to keep both halves of the thought. A decision made there can carry concrete consequences: a delay, a change of plan, a year reorganised, sometimes far more. To say that it is not a verdict on the person is not to say that it does not matter. It is only to refuse it the authority to rewrite the past.
The Physician’s Side of the Glass #
The comparison between the window and the clinic is one I find both illuminating and dangerous, and I want to use it with some care.
It illuminates because physicians know a version of the window’s asymmetry from the routine side of a different kind of counter. A clinic appointment is an event for the patient: arranged around work, worried about beforehand, described afterwards to someone at home. For the physician it is one of the day’s many. Patients sometimes arrive with folders of their own, records gathered from other offices, laboratory printouts in date order, a handwritten list of questions. Any physician knows what it is to be handed such a folder near the end of a long afternoon and to want, in that moment, the short version. I would like to think I have also learned to notice the size of what the folder is standing in for.
The comparison runs further than that, and less comfortably. Physicians are not only receivers of folders; they are also authors of the documents on which other windows rely. A doctor signs the certificate that says a person is fit to work, or not; completes the form that supports a claim of disability; writes the letter that allows a leave, a school absence, an accommodation. In those moments the physician is on the official side of the glass, holding a pen that can reorganise someone else’s year, and the patient across the desk is in the applicant’s position: hopeful, prepared, unsure how much to say. Medicine has its own word for part of this role. Primary care physicians are often called gatekeepers, and the word is meant administratively, but it should give us pause. It is very nearly Kafka’s word.
The comparison is dangerous because the duties are different, and pretending otherwise would flatter the profession. A physician’s first obligation is to the patient in front of him, and even when he signs a form for an employer or an agency, the relationship is built around that person’s welfare. An official at a window acts for an institution and applies its rules; whatever courtesy he shows, his duty does not run to the applicant in the same way. A clinic, moreover, has time on its side. The physician can say come back in two weeks, order another test, change his mind at the next visit. Many windows cannot do that. Their decisions are made in one encounter, on what the folder shows, and the opportunity to correct a misunderstanding may be limited. That difference in follow-up is not a detail. It is much of the difference between a history and an interview.
What the comparison teaches, used carefully, is humility in both directions. The physician who has felt impatience with a thick folder at five in the afternoon has some idea of what it is to be the official. And every physician has also been, at some counter or other, the one holding the folder, at a licensing office or a records department or a bank, unable to explain himself at the length he would have liked. Those two experiences, held together, make it harder to be glib about either role.
After the Window #
Afterwards the folder goes into a drawer. Its pages stay squared and its certificates stay in their sleeves, still showing the results and still keeping quiet about the effort. The person who carried it is allowed to be more complicated than that: prepared, hopeful, uncertain, and a good deal more than the sum of the pages inside.
The person behind the glass goes home too. At the end of the day the official closes the last file, switches off the microphone, and walks out into the same evening as everyone else, a person with a life that no applicant will ever see, and a folder of their own somewhere, no doubt, for some other window. The asymmetry does not vanish when the shift ends. But it is bounded, as the document is bounded. It belongs to the role and the hour, not to the whole of either life.
Kafka’s doorkeeper tells the dying man that the entrance was meant only for him. The line is terrible because it makes the most impersonal of encounters suddenly, uselessly personal, at the moment it can no longer help. A real window, at its best, makes the opposite promise. It was not made only for you. It was made for everyone who comes, and it is meant to treat each of them by the same measure. That is its coldness, and it is also its fairness, and the two cannot be fully separated.
What remains possible, inside that arrangement, is a kind of mutual recognition that does not pretend to equality. The person behind the glass is trying to see accurately on an institution’s behalf. The person in front of it is asking to be seen accurately. Those aims are not identical, and the power to decide sits on one side only. But they are not opposed. On a good day, at a good window, they very nearly coincide: a true answer, a fair reading, a decision made on the evidence and explained. The folder goes into the drawer. The life it stood for goes on, much larger than the pages, and so does the other one, on the far side of the glass.
Evidence and Editorial Note #
Documented findings. Public biography: upbringing and medical education in Amritsar; postgraduate training at the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences, Little Rock (2007–2008), and with UCSF Fresno (2008–2010); practice in California since 2010. The physical arrangement of service windows (glass, tray, microphone, numbered queue): general description of such counters, not of any particular office. Daftar through Persian and Arabic from Greek diphthera, a prepared hide; sifārish as recommendation or influence: standard etymological and lexical reference. Max Weber, Economy and Society (published posthumously, 1922): administration based on written documents (“the files”), the official’s conduct sine ira et studio (a phrase from Tacitus), and bureaucracy’s perfection through elimination of personal feeling, paraphrased from the chapter on bureaucracy. Franz Kafka, “Before the Law” (1915), and its place in The Trial (published 1925) with the priest’s commentary and K.’s reply: standard English translations, paraphrased. Kafka’s employment at the Workers’ Accident Insurance Institute in Prague from 1908 to 1922, his report on safety shafts for wood-planing machines, and Max Brod’s recollection of his remark about the injured workers: standard biographical reference (Brod’s biography of Kafka; Kafka’s collected office writings), paraphrased. Michael Lipsky, Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services (1980): discretion, coping routines and their effect as policy, paraphrased. Barry Schwartz’s sociological argument, from the 1970s, that waiting time is distributed according to power: his published work on waiting, queuing and power, paraphrased in general terms. Ghalib’s travel to Calcutta in the late 1820s to pursue his family pension claim before the East India Company’s government, and the claim’s failure: standard biographical reference. Outcome bias as a described tendency in judgement research and the conversational norm of saying as much as is required: general reference in psychology and philosophy of language, stated without attribution of specific findings. The recording of the chief complaint in the patient’s own words, the term “gatekeeper” for primary care, and physicians’ role in completing fitness, disability and leave documentation: general medical knowledge. facts above rest on the primary texts and standard reference knowledge, confined to well-established points. No statement is made about the rules of any particular office or procedure. Vendor representations. None.
Recollection and tradition. The author’s training sites and dates are his published biography. No particular office, procedure, date, question, document list or outcome is described; the window is treated as a general institutional setting that many people know. No dialogue is reported. Remarks about patients bringing folders, answering questions and reading laboratory numbers are general descriptions of primary care, not accounts of particular patients.
Analysis and forecast. The reading of the folder as evidence that shows results and conceals effort, the argument that a form’s narrowness also protects privacy, the reading of the window’s furniture and of waiting as an arrangement of power, the readings of Kafka, Weber, Lipsky and Ghalib, the distinction between truthful brevity and evasion, the comparison with the chief complaint and with physicians’ own certifying role, and the view that both people at the glass deserve to be seen whole while the asymmetry between them stays visible are the author’s present-day interpretation as of November 6, 2026. Nothing here is advice about any application or process. Independence. This essay is not sponsored by any institution, company, health system or technology developer.
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.