Life is never meant to be easy, especially if you live in a developing country like India. Every human being in our part of the world invariably will have something to complain about at any given point in time.For some the act of grumbling about the unfavourable elements in their environment becomes a habit. Ganeshan* (not his real name) was one such man. He lived in my neighbourhood at Karamana, a quiet neighbourhood in Thiruvananthapuram.
A lot to complain about
Ganeshan’s middle class existence had a lot to complain about, all around him. Those were days when telephone connections were rare, electrical supply was even more erratic than it is today, computers were yet to be available, and reserving a ticket for a journey by train meant half a day’s work.
Ganeshan, born in the early 1960s, could find a reason to grumble even when a trivial hurdle appeared in front of him during the course of his day. Once when he sat down to watch a five-day cricket match on television at his neighbour’s house after bunking college, power supply failed. Ganeshan began cursing the electricity supply authority. As the power came back after an hour, the only television channel available to Indians those days stopped relaying the game. His bitter lament was: “If the game is there power goes, and if power is there, it rains”.
As he settled into his life, Ganeshan often made loud statements criticising people around him for their inefficiency, poor service, lack of professionalism and irresponsible social behaviour. Every such rant would culminate in a sentence praising the efficiency of services available to citizens in the developed western countries, although he had never been abroad himself.
An event to remember
A near-catastrophic event only confirmed his outlook about the difficulties an Indian faces in everyday life. Ganeshan’s wife, in an advanced stage of pregnancy, went into labour. In those days there were hardly any ambulances available on call to ferry patients to hospitals. Ganeshan went on his scooter and fetched a taxi — that took over 20 minutes to arrive. Festivities at a local temple caused a traffic bottleneck, which further delayed the couple’s frantic efforts to reach a hospital. At the Emergency Room (ER) of the hospital, she was attended to by resident doctors who resuscitated and later wheeled her in for an emergency Caesarean section.
Incidentally, I was doing my medical education attached to the same hospital and met Ganeshan in the hospital’s courtyard. He explained his woes to me and bitterly complained that no senior doctors were attending to his wife. I assured him saying that seniors would step in later. But Ganeshan muttered: “Nothing works in our country. I should have left for the United States as some of my friends did.”
Critical views
Luckily for him, a healthy girl-child was born after all the anxious moments. Also, his wife recovered well. But then Ganeshan was still scathingly critical about the poor state of emergency medical care in our country, and all the difficulties and travails that one has to face to access the same.
As the years passed, Ganeshan’s daughter grew up and left for the greener pastures of the United States. Ganeshan too secured a visa to see the country that he always thought was the perfect place on earth. But tragedy struck the couple even as their visit began. Ganeshan’s wife was diagnosed as having an inflammation of her gall bladder requiring emergency surgery. She was rushed to a university hospital but a severe snowstorm delayed the journey. As they reached the ER, she was seen by a nurse, who ordered them to report after three hours as the ER was busy.
The delay
But several hours passed before she was attended to and the inflammation had by then spread, requiring a major abdominal surgery instead of a less morbid, minimal-access alternative. It took almost three months for her to recover from the disease and the couple returned to India.
I paid a courtesy visit to the couple’s home and Ganeshan launched a tirade against the emergency medical care in the U.S. “In a medical emergency, you get only a nurse to attend to you. The delays could have killed my wife.”
At this point, I did not have anything to defend and it was Ganeshan’s wife who responded softly: “Some men always manage to get something to grumble about. My husband got one in his favourite place — the United States of America.”
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