Lip Service on Guru Purnima: What Ayurveda’s Gen Z Must Be Allowed to Ask

Dr. Aakash Kembhavi

The views expressed in this article are entirely personal to the author and reflect an individual perspective on systemic and institutional issues within Ayurvedic education. Nothing here is intended to malign, defame, or cast aspersions on any individual, institution, university, or authority, named or unnamed. The intent is solely constructive — to invite reflection and reform within a profession the author remains deeply committed to.

Today, garlands will go around a thousand photographs. Feet will be touched, WhatsApp status images will change, and institutions will hold ceremonies to honour the guru-shishya parampara. And by evening, almost none of it will have asked the only question that actually honours a teacher: did what I was taught make me capable, or did it only make me obedient?

That question has been missing from Indian public life for a long time, and it has been missing from Ayurveda for longer still. This year it finally surfaced somewhere else first — on the streets, among a generation younger than the one now running our colleges — and it is worth sitting with why it took Gen Z, and not the profession itself, to ask it.

What Gen Z Actually Broke

The recent wave of protest by India’s Gen Z was not, at its core, about any single policy. It was about the collapse of a much older arrangement: that fear and reverence were the acceptable public postures, and dissent, if it existed at all, stayed private, hedged, and anonymous. Every generation before this one that disagreed with an elder, a parent, an institution, or an authority had learned to do it quietly enough that it could never be traced back to a name. Criticism survived, but only in whispers.

What changed was not the presence of dissatisfaction — that had always existed — but the willingness to attach one’s identity to it. That is a genuinely new mindset, and it deserves to be named accurately: not disrespect for tradition, but a refusal to let unexamined tradition substitute for justified authority. A society that cannot tell the difference between the two will keep confusing silence for stability.

India’s relationship with its own past makes this harder than it needs to be. There is a comfort in past glory — in believing that because a civilisation once produced extraordinary knowledge, everything inherited from it must still be correct, or at least beyond question. That comfort has a cost. It lets each generation defer the hard work of evaluating what it received, and pass the same unexamined inheritance to the next. Gen Z’s protest, whatever else it was about, was also a refusal to keep paying that deferred cost on behalf of people who benefited from never asking.

Why Ayurveda Carries Three Walls, Not One

If questioning authority is difficult in Indian society generally, it is harder still inside Ayurveda, because a BAMS student is asked to defer on three separate grounds at once, and each one reinforces the others.

The first is filial — the ordinary respect a younger person owes an elder, which in India is rarely optional and rarely negotiable. The second is cultural — Ayurveda is not treated as a medical system that happens to be old, but as a piece of civilisational identity, so criticising its institutions can be quietly reframed as criticising the culture itself. The third is professional, and it is the most coercive of the three: the senior faculty a student might want to question are also the people who evaluate their practical exams, sign their internship logs, and gatekeep their PG seats. A student who is filially respectful, culturally proud, and professionally dependent has almost no safe position from which to ask, out loud, whether what they are being taught is actually preparing them to treat a patient.

A profession that makes dissent professionally dangerous should not be surprised when its graduates stay silent about its failures until long after the failures have shaped a career.

The Admission Gate: Selecting for Compliance, Not Curiosity

Start at the beginning. The route into a BAMS seat, for a very large number of students, has little to do with an aptitude for medicine or a genuine interest in Ayurveda, and a great deal to do with which rank a student’s NEET score could reach and which capitation a family could afford. This is not a uniquely Ayurvedic problem — professional education across India shares it — but Ayurveda compounds it, because a system that already struggles for institutional respect can least afford to be filling its seats with students who arrived by default rather than by conviction. A profession’s first honest question about itself should be whether the people entering it were selected for curiosity, or merely for capacity to pay and qualify. Ayurveda, for the most part, has not asked that question.

The Curriculum and the Classroom: Reverence Instead of Reasoning

What happens after admission compounds the problem. A significant part of BAMS pedagogy still rewards the ability to reproduce a shloka or a classical classification correctly, rather than the ability to reason from first principles about a patient in front of you. Samhita teaching, in too many classrooms, is presented as something to be memorised and accepted rather than something to be interrogated, translated into present-day clinical reasoning, and tested against outcomes. Where CONSORT, STROBE, CARE and similar reporting frameworks have forced other branches of medicine to be explicit about what they claim and how they know it, large parts of Ayurvedic teaching still permit unfalsifiable claims to pass as settled knowledge simply because they are old.

None of this is an argument against the classical texts. It is an argument against teaching them the way scripture is taught rather than the way a science is taught — as a foundation to be examined, tested, and where necessary revised, not a conclusion to be recited back for marks.

No Revaluation: A Policy That Only Makes Sense If Scrutiny Is Unwelcome

Few things expose a system’s actual relationship with accountability as cleanly as its revaluation policy. In much of Ayurvedic university examination, a student who believes their practical or theory paper has been unfairly assessed has no meaningful route to challenge that assessment — and when students have tried to force the issue, the response from the institutions themselves has been instructive.

In 2021, more than fifty BAMS students affiliated to Kerala University of Health Sciences approached the Kerala High Court after failing subjects they believed had been wrongly evaluated, asking for revaluation rights and access to their own answer scripts and score sheets. KUHS did not respond by agreeing to open the process to scrutiny. It opposed the petition, telling the court that the university follows a double-valuation system rather than revaluation, with a third evaluator brought in only if the first two marks diverge sharply, and that a full release of answer scripts for tens of thousands of students was impractical and a risk to the security and privacy of the evaluation process. The university’s position, in effect, was that its internal checks were sufficient and that the students asking to see their own papers did not need to.

Whatever the merits of that specific case, the pattern it illustrates is the point. A student who believes an evaluator got their paper wrong is treated as a procedural inconvenience to be managed in court, not as a legitimate stakeholder in their own assessment. Compare this to systems that permit re-checking, second examiners, or appeal processes as a matter of course, precisely because evaluators are human and fallible. A system that resists letting its own grading be examined is not protecting academic standards — it is protecting itself from the discomfort of being found wrong. And a profession that trains its future doctors inside an evaluation structure that cannot be questioned should not be surprised when those same doctors grow into seniors who cannot be questioned either. The lesson is absorbed long before the degree is awarded.

The Quiet Truth Every Young BAMS Graduate Carries

This is the part of the essay that is hardest to write plainly, and the part that matters most. A large number of BAMS graduates step out of college privately aware that they are not yet equipped to be called a doctor in the full clinical sense of that word — and they carry that awareness alone, because saying it aloud would be read as ingratitude toward the very teachers and institutions responsible for the gap. So they do what any economically rational young adult would do: they go and learn on their own, from whatever mix of internships, informal mentorships, YouTube demonstrations, and clinical trial-and-error is available to them, while also trying to earn a living from patients who assume the degree already certified their competence.

This is not a story about individual failure. It is a story about an institutional failure that has been quietly outsourced to the individual, generation after generation, because it was easier to let each new batch of graduates absorb the cost privately than to force the system that produced the gap to fix itself.

Naming Who Is Accountable — Including the Present Tense

It would be convenient to describe this as the fault of some distant, unnamed ‘previous generation,’ safely located in the past. It is not that simple, and honesty requires saying so. Many of the people who built, tolerated, or benefited from weak admission screening, rote-heavy curricula, and unreviewable examination systems are not historical figures — they are sitting on academic councils, examination boards, and college managements today. Accountability that only points backward in time is a comfortable kind of accountability, because it asks nothing of anyone currently in a position to change anything.

Real accountability has to include the uncomfortable admission that some of us who now hold titles — Principal, Director, Chief Editor, PhD Guide — came up through exactly the system being described here, and were shaped by it before we were in any position to reform it. That does not excuse continuing to protect it. If anything, it is the reason those of us with institutional standing owe the loudest support to the students now finding the courage to ask what we did not dare ask at their age.

What a Guru Was Actually Supposed to Be

The word guru is usually translated as one who dispels darkness — gu, darkness; ru, one who removes it. Nothing in that definition requires obedience. It requires competence transmitted honestly, and enough respect for the student’s future patients to make sure the darkness is actually gone before the relationship is called complete. A teacher who produces a graduate who privately knows they cannot yet practise safely has not fulfilled that definition, regardless of how devotedly their photograph is garlanded today.

Guru Purnima, treated honestly, is not a day to perform reverence for people who held the role of teacher. It is a day to ask whether the teaching actually taught — whether the darkness was removed, or merely rearranged into a more socially acceptable shape. A profession that cannot ask that question of itself, on the one day of the year built for exactly that question, has turned a relationship into a ritual.

What Ayurveda’s Gen Z Should Now Be Permitted to Ask

The permission this profession owes its youngest members is simple to state and hard to grant: the right to ask, without professional or filial consequence, whether their admission process selected for the right things; whether their curriculum built reasoning or recitation; whether their teaching prepared them for a patient or for an exam; why their evaluations cannot be reviewed when they believe them wrong; and why the gap between their degree and their actual clinical competence was left for them, alone and unpaid, to close.

None of this is disrespect for Ayurveda. It is, if anything, the only form of respect that will keep Ayurveda alive as a serious clinical science rather than preserve it as an unquestioned inheritance. Every generation has to decide whether it will hand its successors a system worth defending, or simply a fear worth continuing. This Guru Purnima, the more useful ritual would be for those of us who teach to ask our students one direct question and mean it: what did I fail to teach you that you then had to go and learn alone? Answering that honestly would do more for the guru-shishya parampara than every garlanded photograph put together.

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