June 15, 2026

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CYBERCHONDRIA NEW AGE MALAISE

Seven months ago, 41-year-old Ritoban Sen, an Indian Institute of Management Ahmedabad graduate working with a leading bank in Mumbai, noticed a small lump on his knee. With rising paranoia, spurred by a family history of cancer, he fed every detail into ChatGPT, and received an elaborate explanation suggesting bone cancer. He consulted three oncologists in Mumbai, all of whom diagnosed simple inflammation and ruled out a biopsy. Still unconvinced, Sen flew to New York City for a fourth opinion, with the same result. "I feel foolish now, but the anxiety then was overwhelming," Sen says with a laugh. If the hypochondriac of yore imagined the slightest bodily symptom as evidence of some debilitating disease, now he has a tool to confirm his worst fears: Dr ChatGPT. Together, they have spawned a creature called the cyberchondriac, whose quick search for online symptoms rapidly spirals into repeated, obsessive checking, with each result escalating anxiety rather than resolving it.

SAMRAT GETS GOING

It is the weekend, yet Bihar chief minister Samrat Choudhary's residential office at 1, Anne Marg in Patna is unusually abuzz with activity. An additional chief secretary, a couple of MLAs and the administrative head of a management institute wait patiently for their turn to meet the man who is close to completing two months in office.At the other end of the corridor, seated behind a desk strewn with files, loose papers and handwritten notes, Choudhary exudes visible command--a reflection of the distinct shift now underway in Bihar's governance style. If his predecessor Nitish Kumar's administrative culture was often defined by long, painstaking reviews, detailed file readings and interruptions such as `go back to the previous presentation slide and explain', Choudhary's approach appears outcome-driven: `Show me the result'.The underlying political signal is unmistakable: the Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) wants Bihar, under its leadership, to project visible momentum, speed and authority.Last month, in a packed review session attended by district magistrates and superintendents of police, the CM spoke in clipped, impatient bursts for nearly 25 minutes. Criminals, Choudhary declared, must face relentless pursuit. Those who assault young girls, he told the senior officers, should be dealt with firmly. "Mala pehna dijiye" (garland their photographs), he said, which is understood as a signal to neutralise hardened criminals. "He does not speak in the old bureaucratic idiom of `the law will take its own course', as his predecessor often did," says one senior official. "The Samrat doctrine appears direct: if criminals