During the last few holidays, when life finally slowed down, I found myself with rare breathing space. Away from urgency and routine, I happened to watch Pharma. What I expected to be a simple way to unwind slowly turned into something deeply unsettling, because the series did not feel like fiction. It felt familiar.

As the story unfolded, my thoughts moved beyond the screen to my own surroundings. I live in a large apartment community, where hundreds of families share the same lifts, corridors, and daily rhythms. It struck me how deeply medicine is woven into everyday life. Behind almost every door, there are tablets for blood pressure, diabetes, and thyroid disorders; inhalers for asthma; syrups for children; insulin pens; vitamin bottles; painkillers; acidity medicines; and sleep aids. Medicine has become a quiet constant in urban living — trusted, routine, and rarely questioned.

This dependence is not imagined. In urban India, more than half of adults above the age of forty are on at least one long-term medication. Among those over sixty, taking three to five medicines daily is common.

Lifestyle diseases such as diabetes and hypertension have risen sharply, placing India among the world’s largest consumers of chronic medication. Alongside this, self-medication remains widespread, especially with painkillers, antacids, and antibiotics, often taken out of habit rather than reassessment.
What Pharma brings into focus is not misuse, but normalisation. When medicine becomes routine, curiosity fades. Prescriptions continue for years without review. Trust replaces questioning. Yet the risks behind this normality are significant. Adverse drug reactions are consistently ranked among the leading causes of death worldwide, and studies show that around one in twenty emergency hospital admissions is linked to medication-related harm. These outcomes rarely feel dramatic. They happen quietly, through delayed side effects, interactions, and long-term damage.

This reflection becomes sharper when we look at how healthcare itself has transformed in India. Many of the country’s largest hospitals are now part of corporate healthcare chains backed by private equity and multinational groups. Hospitals today are not only centres of healing, but also structured businesses with investors, growth expectations, and financial metrics. Within these systems, doctors increasingly work inside corporate frameworks where bed occupancy, procedure volumes, diagnostics utilisation, and revenue per bed are closely tracked.

This does not mean doctors are unethical. Most enter medicine with deep commitment and integrity. But systems influence behaviour. When performance is measured through dashboards and comparisons, clinical decisions inevitably coexist with commercial pressure.

The tension is subtle, rarely explicit, but persistent. Pharma reflects this reality with uncomfortable accuracy.
Harm in medicine is often delayed. Drugs are sometimes recalled years after approval, after millions of doses have already been consumed. By the time action is taken, damage has already occurred, yet accountability is framed in regulatory or technical language rather than ethical failure. Responsibility disperses across research, regulation, prescription, marketing, and consumption, making it difficult to locate.

Silence sustains this structure. Questioning prescriptions feels uncomfortable. Challenging institutional practices feelsrisky. In corporate environments, compliance often feels safer than resistance. Over time, silence becomes normal — and normal becomes invisible.

Nivin Pauly’s character embodies this reality with restraint. He is not unethical by nature. He is intelligent, aware, and conflicted. His journey is not about sudden corruption, but gradual adaptation — learning how to live with discomfort rather than confront systems larger than himself. That adaptation, more than malice, is what allows systemic harm to persist.

This morning, that thought stayed with me. Beyond industries and institutions, there is another layer we often overlook — our immediate communities. We live close to each other, yet remain strangers. In apartment complexes, neighbours share walls, lifts, and parking spaces, but rarely conversations. We know little about who lives next door, who lives alone, who is elderly, who is quietly managing illness, or who might need help in an emergency.

At the very least, we should know the people around us. Not to intrude or judge, but to recognise one another as human beings rather than strangers sharing infrastructure. Knowing neighbours is not about monitoring medicines or personal choices. It is about awareness, connection, and care.
A familiar face, a brief conversation, a simple check-in can sometimes notice what systems miss.

Pharma made me realise that harm often grows in silence — whether in industries or in everyday life. People suffer quietly. Dependencies remain hidden. When communities are disconnected, that silence deepens. When communities know each other, silence has a chance to be broken gently and respectfully.

Perhaps we cannot change pharmaceutical systems or corporate healthcare overnight. But we can start smaller. We can build community. We can know our neighbours. We can create care without intrusion and awareness without control.

Sometimes responsibility does not begin with regulation or reform.
It begins with recognition — of the people living right beside