Shiv sat across from me in my office, a pleasant man in his mid-forties with a neatly mowed salt-and-pepper lawn atop his head. “I took your appointment to ask about my mother’s spine. I’ve been told she needs an operation, and I wanted a second opinion,” he said, pulling out his phone from a purple and silver striped suit pocket to show me some reports. “She’s back home in Delhi and has severe lower back pain going down both calves. She’s 70 and can’t walk for more than 10 minutes. There are pins and needles in the feet, the legs feel heavy,” he described all the typical symptoms of lumbar stenosis—nerve compression in the lower spine.

I began to type notes on my desktop. “Wait! Before I trust you with her life, are you still running Windows XP?” he interjected. I didn’t know what the hell he was talking about. “What’s that got to do with your mother’s spine?” I asked, a little perturbed. “I can hack into your system and gain access to all your hospital data, meddle with patient records, and tamper with billing,” he confessed. 
“Why would you do that?” I asked, a little testily.