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| Heart of the matter: Surgeons at Papworth, Cambridge |
Don’t trust me, I’m a doctor
Imagine a situation like this: a family member is taken ill. A doctor is summoned and he recommends “immediate” admission to one of several hospitals to which he is attached.
The hospital says there are no available beds but could possibly find space in the intensive care unit (ICU).
Family members, at their most vulnerable, want to know what is wrong with the patient.
The hospital has other priorities. “We can’t say anything until we have done the tests. Bring money tomorrow — Rs 15,000 in cash.”
Two days later: “Bring Rs 30,000 — in cash.”
Should I name the hospitals in Calcutta where this is going on?
In Britain, where we have a National Health Service (NHS), treatment is free at the point of delivery. In the private sector, tax inspectors would take a close interest if money was demanded from patients in cash.
The budget for Britain’s NHS is now in excess of £100 billion raised from taxpayers through national insurance contributions. But even this huge sum is not enough to cope with the growing demands of Britain’s ageing population.
Although Britain’s NHS is facing a crisis, no one is turned away because of poverty. And no one is encouraged to have an unnecessary operation because an NHS doctor, who is on a salary, is not on a commission.
Someone of my acquaintance with eye problems was told by a top Calcutta specialist: “You need operations on both your eyes — Rs 25,000 each.”
But in London, when he was thoroughly checked by a team at his own NHS hospital, he was relieved to be advised: “No operations are necessary.”
In India, many doctors probably do the best for their patients. But the method of cash payments before treatment encourages a system that turns patients into cash cows — and it is this abuse that Mamata must stamp out.
And from what I have gathered do not enter the ICU if you can help it — you may never come out.
My ideal would be for India to have something similar to England’s NHS.
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Mystery lady
Having very much enjoyed the debut novel by Glen Peters, I am pleased to confirm that his second novel should be out early next year.
In the first novel, Mrs D’Silva’s Detective Instincts and the Shaitan of Calcutta, set among the Anglo-Indian community in Calcutta, Joan D’Silva, a schoolteacher at Don Bosco School in Liluah, solves the mystery behind the murder of Agnes. She is an 18-year-old whose body turns up by the river bank in Bandel while a party of Anglo-Indians are enjoying a picnic. The body is discovered by Joan’s 10-year-old son, Erroll.
I am sure the story will make an excellent Bengali film but in English. Meanwhile, Glen is trying to turn the novel into a play.
His heroine, Joan D’Silva, whom we met in the first novel as a good-looking 32-year-old widow, feels she had made dangerous enemies in Calcutta while solving the murder of Agnes and has moved to Lucknow with her son. She is ready for her second adventure, Mrs D’Silva & and the Lucknow Swami, which involves a poisoning plot at the local Dalda factory.
The second novel will also be published by Parthian Books, a small but high quality publishing house in Wales, where Glen has a home-cum-arts centre.
I haven’t quite finished reading the manuscript of the second novel but Glen creates an entirely believable world of Anglo-Indians, sadly a diminishing population in India. What I like about Glen’s output is that he produces page turners.
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| Hitman: Ravi Gupta, Producer of Noukadubi |
Hindi poser
The Bengali language movie, Noukadubi (Boat Wreck), shown last week at the London Film Festival, was made with only £2,00,000, and proves my first law of cinema: the smaller the budget, the better the film.
We could live with the absence of the director Rituparno Ghosh at the post-screening Q&A, since he comes to London often enough, but it was a mistake not to organise a trip for the Sen sisters, Raima and Riya.
It’s a toss up who performs better in the film, which was well received.
The producer, Ravi Gupta, who is from Subhash Ghai’s Mukta Arts, took the questions and disclosed something quite revealing: while the Bengali-language original had been a great hit in Bengali, the slightly shorter Hindi-language version had been a complete flop.
Later, Gupta agreed that traditional audiences who watch nothing but Bollywood movies have been brought up on the cinematic equivalent of hamburgers and “no longer appreciate gourmet food”.
Return back
A number of articles have appeared in British newspapers, highlighting the trend among Indians to uproot from the West and move to India. But I noticed one family had decided to return back.
At school in Patna, I was taught never to say “return back” because “then you end up where you began”.
But that is exactly what has happened to one Sumedh Mungee, who appears to have poured out his soul in an article, Why I Left India (Again), in The New York Times.
He and his wife, both software engineers, have gone back to America with their daughter after spending two years and nine months trying to settle in Bangalore before deciding the experiment hadn’t worked. “When I first left India in 1996, I left for the US. When I left India in 2009, I left India.”
His conclusion: “I know India will rule the future. It’s just that I’ve realised — I’ve resigned myself to the fact — that I won’t be a part of that future.”
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Lord’s lady
Indarjit Singh, 79, well known for his Thought for the Day on BBC Radio 4, was introduced at Westminster last week as Lord Singh of Wimbledon, thereby becoming the first turbaned Sikh in either chamber.
As the number of Asian lords grow, so do their accompanying ladies.
Indarjit’s wife, Kanwaljit Kaur, watched the ceremony from a high gallery with probably the largest gathering of Sikhs seen in the upper chamber.
One day she could easily be seated alongside her husband as a baroness in her own right — in June this year Lady Singh, chairman, British Sikh Educational Council, received an Order of the British Empire, an honour, “for services to education and to inter-faith understanding”.
Tittle tattle
Jeremy Clarkson, high profile presenter of a BBC television programme on motoring called Top Gear, has abandoned a “pointless” legal injunction that was initially aimed at preventing a woman from selling her “kiss and tell” story.
What is odd is that the woman concerned is Clarkson’s ex-wife, Alexandra Hall, who alleges the 51-year-old presenter had an affair with her after he had married his current wife, Frances.
In such cases, timing is everything.
That former partners can sometimes still retain their appeal is demonstrated by the ubiquitous Jemima Khan, who is in Pakistan to hear Imran Khan drone on about, well, drones. Jemima has paid for 50 cameras to be given to tribal leaders so that they can film American drone attacks.
In May this year Jemima denied (false) rumours that she had had an affair with — who else? — Jeremy Clarkson, who sent her a humorous message: “It’s odd. I’m sure I’d remember if any photos of us existed.”
