Dr. Jehangir Sorabjee, distinguished physician, educator and on wellness and the right approach to a long life
We can trace human existence back to the last maybe half a million years, 500,000 years, and then bring it into this last century, and I ask you what was the average life expectancy of an Indian a hundred years ago, say in 1925, you’ll be shocked to know that it was just 25 or 26 years. That was it. And that was probably the same life expectancy that had been there half a million years ago..
By Independence, the average life expectancy of Indians moved up to 32 years. Right now, it’s crossed 70. And, the world’s average life expectancy is about 72 years. So, India is not doing too badly. But to put that in perspective, one in three people born in the UK today will live to be a hundred. So, the question that you want to ask yourself is, is it sensible for people to be living so long, utilising the resources of the planet, spewing toxic gases into the atmosphere, burning holes in the stratosphere, and causing global warming? Or, should we just follow nature and die at the right time?
What we also need to look at is: what’s caused this huge change? Why is it that in the last 100 years, we have moved from 26 years to 70? And, are we going to stop there, or are we going to keep on living longer and longer? So the first thing that seems to have caused the increase in longevity is our capacity to control infections and infectious diseases. Infections and infectious diseases used to just wipe out entire populations. The British, when they ruled India, were more terrified of epidemics of cholera than they were of fighting Indians anywhere because suddenly you’d get an outbreak of cholera in the camp and there’d be hundreds of people who died within the same day.
Slowly, with the discovery of vaccines, with more modern science coming in to understand how to diagnose infectious diseases, and then, finally, with the advent of miraculous antibiotics, things changed as far as infections were concerned. I remember my grandmother telling me that when chloramphenicol was first available for typhoid in around 1950–51, there were riots all over Bombay because, prior to chloramphenicol’s advent, typhoid was an illness which lasted three months. Half the people died; those who recovered lost half their body weight, lost their hair, everything. But once you got chloramphenicol, you were better in a week. This recognition and control of infectious diseases has made a big change. And, we are on top of it even now. I point out to you the example of HIV, which is an infectious disease that is relatively recent. It’s come up in the 1980s and 1990s.
Even today, it is remarkably controlled. People take one pill a day, and they’re practically like normal individuals. We don’t even advise them to use condoms when they have sexual contact with their partners. And they go ahead and have children without any necessary protection. Just one pill a day has done that, with no side effects. In fact, there’s a joke that when you look at the statistics, people with HIV are living longer than normal people, purely because of the fact that they’re so well monitored. And everyone’s looking, “OK, what’s your creatinine? What’s your lipids?” Nobody does that with normal people. So, we’ve been able to get on top of that. We’ve been able to get on top of COVID. We have excellent surveillance systems for infectious diseases. So, if three people die somewhere in Rwanda or somewhere of some strange disease, suddenly the whole planet knows about it. And all the systems kick into place to find out exactly what that is and what needs to be done to address it.
So infections, by and large, have been controlled. And it’s probably brought the lifespan up from the 30s to the 50s. But then what has happened is that, and also the other thing which goes with infection, is that countries have tackled malnutrition and poverty. Malnutrition and poverty actually caused people to die because of infections, because they had no defense against them and were poorly nourished. I remember, as a kid in school, we were given cards and told, “Famine in Bihar — go to everyone’s house, collect 10 rupees, and get them to sign there.”
There are no more famines of that nature anymore. And it’s very odd, I think, even in our country at this point, to find that people would actually die of significant malnutrition and poverty on the scale that happened 50 years ago. But what’s happened as a result of that and the prosperity that’s occurred is that we’ve started developing a lot of what I would call lifestyle diseases. And now we’ve begun to accept the fact that it’s, “Yeah, yeah, people get heart attacks, they get strokes.”
Heart attacks and strokes are part of life. But actually, that’s not necessarily true. I remember when we were studying pathology, there were comments by pathologists that when they did examinations of the blood vessels of African natives who’d lived for a long time, they found nothing in the blood vessels. There were no blockages, no deposition of fat, no accumulation of cholesterol. And this is something which has come about only with industrialisation, prosperity, and over-nutrition.
So from malnutrition, we’ve now swung to the other side of the pendulum, where we’re over-nourished. And because we’re over-nourished, we’re ending up with all kinds of problems. If you’re prosperous, you eat a nice meal at the Rotary club on Tuesdays, and then afterwards who knows what. But the answer is that we’ve been able to tackle that as well. So, the lifestyle diseases where you heard of people dropping dead in their 50s and 60s of heart attacks, that has also now become relatively uncommon. I often hear people say, “Oh, a 25th wedding anniversary.” But 25 years — what’s so big about it? When you understand that people didn’t live that long, 25 years was a long period of time. It’s just now that everyone’s living to be 80 and 90 that you feel that, “OK, this is just one silly little number that you pass on the highway of life.”
As far as the control of lifestyle diseases is concerned, one of the things I notice the most is obesity in prosperous people. I often tell my residents, “I can’t examine people’s abdomens anymore because they’re just so filled with fat.” Whereas, when I was in JJ Hospital and I used to examine labourers, it was so easy to feel all the organs in the body because you didn’t have to plunge through six inches of thick lard to actually get there. We now know that smoking is a killer, so we’ve stopped smoking. We know how to control high blood pressure. We know that diabetes is a big factor. We know cholesterol needs to be controlled. We know that sedentary lifestyles can cause problems. And we know that family history is a big factor in all of these things.
So, to some extent, we are on top of understanding whether we have self-control or not, whether we’re getting the right medication from doctors. That’s a different matter. Medication is constantly evolving and improving, as are the recommendations on when and at what age to take them, and how often to test. These things change, and that’s part of the process. However, the fact remains that with these tools, I’m sure we’ve once again extended our lifespan — not just with medication, but also with procedures like the new clot-busting drugs that dissolve clots as soon as you have a heart attack. Now, people talk about the “symptom-to-table” timeframe. That means, if you’ve had a blockage in your coronary artery, western countries aim to have you on the operating table and undergoing angioplasty to remove the clot within an hour or an hour and 15 minutes. They are timing and checking to see if the system functions efficiently enough to achieve this.
We’ve got technology, stenting, surgery, and, of course, new drugs. The GLP-1 analogues, like the Ozempic group of drugs, have been miraculous. They work by sending signals to the brain to say, “I’m full.” Normally, when you eat, there’s a delay before the brain receives that signal, so you keep eating. These injections send the signal faster, making you stop eating sooner.
What’s absolutely astounding is that some of these drugs, which are improving all the time, can cause a 20% reduction in body weight. That’s truly amazing. Moreover, while these drugs were originally developed for diabetes, they are now licensed for treating morbid obesity, sleep apnoea, and even cardiac and kidney diseases. The benefits extend far beyond their initial purpose. What we are learning is that these drugs work because we’ve overnourished ourselves for years. By reversing that overnourishment, we uncover these health benefits. It’s a lesson in itself. Of course, the drugs aren’t without side effects. So it’s much better not to think, “I’ll eat everything and then just take a little Ozempic or a bit of statin as part of my meal.” That’s not the right approach.
Moving on to lifestyle diseases: another major factor that has prevented people from reaching old age is malignancies. There has been significant progress here too. Screening, detection, and technology have advanced. Highly sophisticated radioactive scans can now detect minute malignancies, allowing them to be addressed at an early stage when the chances of a cure are much higher. Chemotherapy has become less toxic and better tolerated, surgeries are less invasive, and new classes of drugs, such as biologics and immune modulators, can push cancers into remission or even cure them.
In the past, malignancy was almost always a death sentence, especially in the 1960s and 70s. I recently came across letters from my dad’s uncle, who travelled all the way to New York in 1966 for lung cancer treatment. He underwent aggressive cobalt therapy and other treatments, only to return home completely weakened and pass away shortly after. Back then, the cure was often as bad as the disease. Now, however, we are far more advanced.
This leaves us with degenerative diseases. As we grow older — into our 80s or 90s — our bodies naturally function less efficiently. The kidneys and liver slow down, brain function declines, and memory weakens. Can we do something about this? Can we extend life even further? Science is certainly looking into it.
If I told someone in 1925, when the average Indian life expectancy was 26 or 27 years, that the average would eventually rise to 72, and that many people would live healthily into their 90s or 100s, they would have laughed. Yet, here we are. It’s possible that, at our current stage of medical science, we’re on the verge of understanding how aging occurs and how to intervene. Unsurprisingly, the Israelis are leading the way. They’ve developed a vaccine aimed at halting apoptosis, the programmed death of cells. When cells die and aren’t cleared from tissues, they cause inflammation. This vaccine stimulates an immune response to clear dead cells and prevent apoptosis. Additionally, senolytics help clear debris from dead cells.
Interestingly, simple things like exercise, calorie reduction, and better sleep can also combat the decline in tissue function. Sleep, for instance, is critical because it’s when the brain flushes out accumulated toxins. These basic measures are now being given priority and are better understood.
Who knows? If one in three people in the UK is already living to 100, we might see even longer lifespans soon. However, this raises societal questions. Is it necessarily good for society? With younger generations having fewer children, who will care for an aging population? The economic burden on the state is significant. But setting aside the longevity debate, we must focus on wellness.
Physical wellness is essential, and it’s crucial to recognise and intelligently address any active disease process. Unfortunately, in countries like ours, the prevalence of multiple medical systems often leads to chaos. To my shock, just yesterday, I saw a highly intelligent patient who had been correctly diagnosed with TB in the lungs, brain, and spinal cord. After two months of treatment, they came to me for another opinion. Everything was progressing well. But then I found out they had stopped the medication. When I asked why, they said they felt better after taking nutraceuticals and had decided to discontinue the TB treatment. I had to tell them, “I cannot handle this kind of case. If you’re going to rely on nutraceuticals and neglect life-saving TB treatment, I’m not the doctor for you.”
But the point is that patients have their own autonomy in this country. They can decide: they want to take Ayurvedic treatment, they want to take homoeopathic treatment, they want to take Yunani treatment, they want to take no treatment, or they want to take vitamins or whatever. So, you can’t really interfere with that. And then you just have to sort of decide how much you want to be involved in that process or whether you want to actually withdraw. So, the active disease or the disease under treatment needs to be addressed.
The second thing, which I think everyone would like, is that you need to remain well. More and more now, there’s an emphasis on preventive health check-ups and comprehensive test programmes, which is a good thing. It’s important for us to actually screen for issues.
Very often, these tests are random, where a battery of tests is done, and they say, “Okay, you’re 60, do this package, and we’ll see what comes up.” Possibly, tests that are better targeted — knowing what the family history is like, knowing what other illnesses you’ve had in the past — would be more productive. The problem with these tests is that, yes, they’re very reassuring when everything comes back normal, but sometimes they reveal what we call incidentalomas — something incidentally found. Then we have to scratch our heads and decide: was this always there?
Do we have an old ECG to compare? Is there an old X-ray to see whether the shadow was there 20 years ago or not? Do we need to investigate it further, or do we just monitor and say, “Come back again”? At that point in time, you need a good clinician who can guide you effectively without aggressively ordering ten more tests, which may lead to even more findings that potentially show nothing. Sometimes, these can lead to complications, especially if invasive procedures are pursued.
For instance, endoscopies are not routine here because we don’t have a high incidence of certain GI cancers, but they are coming into play. Coronary CT scans to check for calcium deposition, cholesterol monitoring, and vaccinations have also become prevalent. Elderly people are getting vaccinated against pneumonia, flu, and shingles — and possibly against ageing, if the Israelis get it right. Who knows? We’ll get there.
The point is, you can be physically well without any disease, you can be reasonably screened for potential problems, but are you well in a mental sense? Are you happy? Are you comfortable with life and what goes on? That’s a big question. On an average day, when I see about 15 to 17 patients in the clinic, close to half of them present with what I’d describe as stress-related issues.
I don’t use the term “mental illness,” but I’d classify it as stress-related or as non-pathological physiological disorders. These need to be addressed because they often manifest as physical symptoms. It’s rare for a patient to say, “Doctor, I’m depressed, I’m crying all the time, I feel horrible, and I want to harm myself.” Instead, they report headaches, backaches, knee pain, breathing issues, anxiety, or insomnia. It’s up to the doctor to sort through these complaints and identify the underlying issue.
Most of these issues arise from the severe stress and strain of modern life. Patients present with panic attacks, chronic insomnia, anxiety, depression, and loneliness. Loneliness is particularly prominent as children often live abroad, and many don’t frequently meet family or friends. There’s a strong interplay between mental and physical health.
Treatment often requires a philosophical approach. Many people have high expectations and demand perfection. If nine things are going well but one thing isn’t, that one issue clouds their mind entirely. They lose sleep over it, unable to focus on the positive aspects of their lives.
I saw a lovely meme the other day: “Yes, you have a thousand problems — until you have a health problem. Then you only have one problem.” It’s a profound way to think. People rarely acknowledge the positive aspects of their lives. Ambition can cloud their judgement. Some people either want to own the whole world or rule it. When things don’t go their way, they become disheartened.
A philosophical understanding and belief in life can provide stability as you age. Enjoying simple pleasures, maintaining a balanced diet, and moderating indulgence are essential. One of my former teachers used to say, “We dig our graves with our teeth.” We must exercise restraint and learn to say no when necessary.
Developing diverse interests is also crucial. If you focus solely on work for 40–50 years, you may become anxious about competition from younger professionals. It’s important to rise above petty concerns and recognise that the world has space for everyone. Hobbies, new friendships, and engaging in different activities outside one’s profession or family can bring immense joy.
Participating in community service, like Rotary Club activities, brings positivity and good mental health. The medical innovations of the last century have extended lifespans. However, whether we live well or merely exist depends on our approach to life, our mental outlook, and our happiness.
Of course, genetic factors also play a significant role. Some families, unfortunately, have chemical imbalances or a history of not surviving beyond 60 without major interventions. Others thrive well into their nineties, staying active and enjoying life.
The moral of the story? It’s crucial to choose your parents carefully!
What do you have to say to people who are vaccine naysayers? Let’s put it this way, there’s no question about the fact that no drug is 100% perfect and there will be side effects. But you have to look at the overall benefits of the whole thing. And many of the conditions which have been attributed to vaccination like autism and other things which are vague, they’re impossible to prove. You require massive studies which go on for 20, 40, 50 years in detail. So, you look at the overall benefits that have occurred as a result of vaccination for so many diseases and the improvements in vaccination. I mean, a disease like hepatitis B, you don’t see anymore. Or you hardly see because of the fact that there’s vaccination. I think scientific evidence is the proof but there will always be people who are conspiracy theorists and will not believe what you say. But you can’t help that.
I want to know the scientific basis of cryogenics. Can you really be in suspended animation?
I think there’s some research into that being done by people who are a little on the fad-dic side of things. But essentially, the capacity to actually put the body into suspended animation for very long periods of time, like months, years, et cetera, does not exist. Possibly it will come. I mean, Anand will tell you that you can practically stop a person’s heart and put him on a machine for hours while you actually operate on him, and then you can restart the heart. But whether you can keep that process going for a very long period of time, the answer is right now no, and the answer is that not in the near future.
We have longevity, and you use the magic words this is territory medicine. What do you do with people who live so long? It’s a sociological burden. In this country, you know, you are really blessed that you have a social burden, or you have your parents to go. We don’t have that luxury in us. I’m sure time will come as you said in a way. And I think that’s something to be addressed and have you given any thought to that?
So yes, I think we have two positives here in India one is that there’s a very strong family structure So people don’t walk away from their parents. They definitely feel a very strong socio-religious responsibility to take care of their elderly parents. But I think in the West that that doesn’t exist that much. Second is that you can provide very good care in the house at a limited cost at a reasonable cost. I remember when my father was ill and he passed away at 91 and I had a day and a night nurse looking after him, male nurses who could take instructions. And I would say right tomorrow get these blood tests done or an x-ray, WhatsApp me the x-ray report, start the IV antibiotics, put him back on his nebulizers, oxygen, et cetera. So we could actually create that without enormous cost. But on the other hand, I know that a friend of mine who’s been travelling to the UK to give relief care to someone, for an elderly person who is gone into a private care home in somewhere in the UK, it’s 1,700 pounds a week. And so they have had to sell their house, they’ve had to give up all their savings. So your question is very well taken, is that whether people really should be living that long without productive lives, just when they’re sort of a slight burden on the family and on the environment. It’s a difficult question to answer, actually.
But there are more and more elderly care homes which are starting here now, and some very good ones. A friend of mine who put his parents in an elderly care home because he was the only child, and he was a professor at Great Ormond Street Hospital in London. He said that he was shocked when he came back and saw his parents in the elderly home. It was as if they had a new life. They had so many friends. So loneliness, which they had before, was completely taken care of. And so I think that these kind of homes for elderly people will really increase as people live longer and longer.
Back to the infectious disease part. You’re a specialist in HIV. Have you found COVID-induced HIV? Because that’s become a big thing?
Not really. Because basically, the means of transmission of HIV are fairly clear. It’s sexual transmission, contaminated needles, blood, blood products, or from mother to child. And COVID is transmitted by basically inhalation of virus.
Many youngsters are dying of heart attacks these days. What is the reason? It’s very frightening, 33-year-old, 40-year-old, no history of heart disease.
I don’t have an answer to that question, actually. First of all, the question is that is this really a higher incidence over what has been happening in the last 25-30 years, or is this getting more publicity? And if we look at the numbers, we may find that, oh, there’s many young people who have been dying for the last couple of decades in any case, so there’s nothing new about that. The question as to why they’re dying at a young age is difficult to answer without exact detailed post-mortem analysis to see whether some of these guys have congenital abnormalities in the heart which cause people to die when they over-exercise. It’s called athlete’s heart syndrome. Or they have some electrical abnormality, which causes the rhythm of the heart to short-circuit, and then for them to collapse. Most of the times, it’s that. Sometimes it could be a clot in the legs that suddenly breaks off and goes into the lungs. So we can’t 100% be sure as to why all these people are dying until we know what each individual circumstance was. One of them may have just had uncontrolled hypertension from stress and popped a blood vessel in the brain and just died of an intracerebral hemorrhage, which is a completely different condition from someone who was born with a congenital abnormality in the heart. So the answer to that is that, yeah, I think more screening is the key, better control of blood pressure, monitoring at an earlier age. And I know that my son who’s paranoid about his health rushed to have an echo cardiogram and an ECG and all kinds of stuff done because he heard that someone about his age had passed away. And naturally, he’s nervous. And I don’t blame him for that. And especially when it happens to people who are very fit, very athletic.
What about COVID? People say that a lot of the people who have the vaccine are getting heart attacks.
The answer to that also is that there may be some truth in that, but the numbers are nowhere near what they’re speculated to be. Because if you look at the hundreds of millions of people who have had COVID vaccine, if you found that people actually were getting cardiac problems from that, then you’d be finding people dropping their like flies in that sense. But there may be some who are also, because of the COVID vaccine, have had some clotting abnormalities. And we know that COVID itself did cause clotting.
You know, as you get older, the GP says, take this vaccine, take the happy vaccine, take the typhoid vaccine, take the flu vaccine. What should one do?
So there are certain, definitely. recommendations for vaccines in certain groups. For example, I think for pneumonia vaccines is for over 60, for shingles vaccine for it’s over 65. Most of these vaccines are tried and tested and they’ve been around for a long time so they don’t cause any side effects, the flu vaccine etc. So the answer is yep, better take it. At the end of the day, you have to think that why is everybody living to be 90? There must be some reason. It’s because the fact that they’re taking statins, they’re controlling their blood pressure, they’re taking vaccines etc. So all these little interventions are what are cumulatively adding up to our current increased longevity.
Do you think that a healthy person who has no complaints should go for all kinds of tests as a preventive measure? For example, I read Tony Robbins who says you do a gut test and you do CT angiography and do Alzheimer’s tests, there are six, seven tests are recommended tests for even a healthy person.
So, I think, yes, there is basically standard screening, screening tests. I mean, let’s look at it simply. You would want your blood pressure taken to find out if you had high blood pressure or not, right? That would be the most basic form of screening. You would like a blood sugar to be done to know whether you have diabetes or not. Then, to the extent that you would like to know whether your cholesterol was high. So, you would like to do that. You would like to do your haemoglobin to see if your haemoglobin was low. So, the answer is that, yes, certain basic tests need to be done, but you don’t need to completely go bananas and over-investigate the person constantly. You don’t need to do it too often. So, there are standard recommendations and protocols which have come from the West as to how often screening needs to be done. And you certainly don’t need to do a sophisticated test. I can see no reason, for example, for doing an MRI of the brain in a normal person. It will not show you anything. And if it shows you anything, it probably isn’t significant. And it’s just going to cause, as you pointed out, unnecessary panic and anxiety, which doesn’t help. But in the long run, as far as your health is concerned, it’s best to know what you’ve got. So, it can be dealt with rather than not know. So, saying that, oh, I’m fine. I played a game of squash yesterday. And not doing some basic tests may not necessarily be the right approach.
These Parkinson’s and Alzheimer’s, maybe dementia, thoughts on how we are doing as a country and maybe the world, and then dopamine is really a wonder drug for this kind of thing?
Yeah, so basically what happens in Parkinsonism is that the cells which produce dopamine, which produces fluidity of movement in the body, they tend to die out. They degenerate. I’m not absolutely sure why. And they’re different what we call phenotypes to the whole thing. Some are Parkinson’s with a little bit of this, with a little bit of that, with a little bit of this. We have to understand which category people fall into. And the drugs for Parkinson’s unfortunately are not great. They’re there, but then they tend to wear off after a period of time. And there are all kinds of funny things happening. I was recently travelling in Rajasthan in Bundi, and I came across a French-Canadian guy who had had two brain electrodes planted in his brain, which were sort of to give deep brain stimulation to help his Parkinson’s. And he had a huge battery which was placed under his chest, and he said he had to recharge that every couple of days by putting something on his skin. So I said, wow, that’s quite important. He said, but if that was not there, I wouldn’t have been able to walk. And he said that he had been reduced to being completely stuck in a chair. So the answer is that the innovations for Parkinson’s aren’t great, but they’re coming in. and we need to understand exactly what the degenerative processes are and if we can create some kind of wonder drug that can arrest it or stop it or whatever we can do.
Same with dementia.
You said sleep apnea is the most under-diagnosed and it just happened that I snore so they said you do sleep apnea test and I’ve been on that ResMed all along. Now do I ever get off it or I cannot get off it?
Well, it’s basically what it is, it’s a mechanical thing. So it’s the shape of your neck, your tongue and your oropharynx. So what happens is that when you lie down and your tissues become lax, there’s vibration of the soft palate which produces a lot of snoring and the tongue falls back in a small entrance and blocks it as a result of which you don’t get enough oxygen going into your lungs and therefore you don’t get enough oxygen going to the brain. So in some instances if you have lost a lot of weight, so the fatty tissue around the neck disappears and the obstruction becomes less, you might get lucky and come off the machine.
My little old grandmother always said, the longer you live, the more sorrow you see. So my philosophy is, why worry about it? And the gentleman in Pennsylvania, the way to deal with old people is, we’re making friends that are 10 years younger than us. Because in USA, friends are family. So that’s what we do.
That’s true. And it’s very important to have friends. And the more you take up different hobbies and do, I mean, everybody seems to be playing mahjong these days. I don’t know what’s happened previously there used to be bridge. So it’s become an epidemic of mahjong nights all over the place. But they’re making good friends. They’re having fun. So I would think that’s great. And there’ll be other things as well.
One of the things which is pervasive now in India and Mumbai particularly is the degeneration of the environment, right? So the AQI and everything else. Correct. How much of an impact is that going to have on our life expectancy and what are the things that we can do to be able to address that while we can’t clear the air, but at least what we can do is take care of ourselves?
So that’s a difficult one because it’s difficult to quantify. There’s no question about the fact is that it’s all interrelated. The fact that we are living long, we’re clustering in cities, we’re producing all these carbon emissions which are polluting the atmosphere. We’re probably swallowing all these microplastics, which are also not good for the body. And one has to be careful about that. Now, whether that has a direct impact on your life and you can say that, okay, people in Delhi definitely live five years less than people in Bombay or whatever, it’s not easy to come to that definitive conclusion. But certainly you have to protect your own lungs because if the air you breathe is contaminated and has high particulate matter, then you’re going to land up with a lot of chest infections and inflammation in the lining of your lungs and damage to your lungs.
How much of these wellness innovations or just general innovations are coming out of India and how much are we still importing a lot from the West?
It’s all from the West because I think in India we are more interested in firefighting the situations that we actually have, rather than saying, okay, this is all passed us now, let’s look at how we can land up being successful humans who live forever. And I’m not sure who asked that question but it’s the other way also. I mean I’ve had I had to deal with about a year and a half ago a Parsi gentleman who decided he was just fed up of life and he didn’t want to live anymore so he signed up with this Swiss clinic Dignitas paid the money and said I’m going then I’m gonna put an end to my life. sSo everybody said please go and talk to him because he’s overreacting to his situation and we had lunch together and then he explained to me, that no I get sometimes breathless when I tie my shoelaces I said that’s been happening to me for ten years you know and I don’t want to be incapable of ending my life on my own if I can’t reach for my tablets and my dog died, and my this happened and that happened, all this kind of. So I had to say that you’ve not assessed yourself medically. Go back to the doctors and ask them to get portable oxygen, do this do that. So he accepted that I must say that after the lunch, I hid in a corner to see exactly how mobile he was and he zipped across the road got in his car and drove off but he did end his life. After one and a half years, after numerous delays, and finally the Swiss clinic sending him an email saying make up your mind. Do you want to die or not? You can’t keep on postponing and you’re not getting a refund. He toodled off and ended his life. So, he was 73 or 74.
Talking of Parsis. I want to tell you that the Parsis have cracked the code. Yes, they have actually we have unhealthy eating habits Yeah, unhealthy drinking habits, but we live to be more than 90-95. Correct. And that’s because of what you suggested we’ve chosen our parents.
J.R.D. Tata famously said that Parsis are indestructible. Finally, you just have to put them down.
Why aren’t you at Breach candy hospital?
Let me put it this way. Breach Candy has some very good doctors and I’ve had a lot of good fortune in life and I think that my skills and talents should be available to some people from middle class and poor backgrounds as well and they are The kind of people who come to Bombay Hospital. I’m quite happy to be there. Also, Bombay Hospital’s University Recognised Training Institute, so I get to train people to create numerous new physicians who hopefully will have good ethics and ethos and work hard as well.