Let me start with a quote from a very respectable MEDICAL JOURNAL…here is what the editor has to say about Doctor’s Continuing Education program being sponsored by the pharma industry:

“This is marketing masquerading as education. It is self-evidently absurd to look to companies for critical, unbiased education about products they sell. It’s like asking a brewery to teach you about alcoholism, or a Honda dealer for a recommendation about what car to buy. Doctors recognize this in other parts of their lives, but they’ve convinced themselves that drug companies are different. That industry-sponsored education is a masquerade is underscored by the fact that some of the biggest Madison Avenue ad agencies, hired by drug companies to promote their products, also own their own medical-education companies. It’s one-stop shopping for the industry.”

Frankly do  I need to add anything to this? Imagine a financial education program sponsored by a life insurance company or a mutual fund. It hardly matters who is the audience, right? Journalists who go on a foreign jaunt to ‘test drive’ a car which will NEVER be sold in India cannot be independent right?

So who should incur the expense of an investor literacy program?

THE GODDAMN APATHETIC INVESTOR.

If a doctor takes Piano classes who should pay for the classes? the piano teacher, the place where the piano is kept, the pharma industry, the patient or the doctor himself?

Well doctors believe it is the pharma industry.

When I try doing a talk show to the doctors or my professional brothers and sisters – normally the first question is who will pay for the rent of the place, the statutory samosa, chai,…and some more poison…

If I haw and hum…they will quickly tell me ‘we can find a sponsor’…

Yuck if the PROFESSIONALS in this country do not want to pay for their ‘continuing education’ why do we expect the all knowing common man to pay for his financial education? OBVIOUSLY he will not.

God Bless. Mera Bharat Mahan.