Social Story – Medical Philanthropy
Photo credit: mconnors from morguefile.com
With two children who chose, basic science and commerce, the educational expense is, luckily for me, not too high. That it is not affordable with what I earn (as and when I do!) or borrow from is another story. A friend of mine had paid a capitation of over Fifty Lakhs to get his daughter admitted at a popular medical college here!
During my “schooling era”, the most popular idols in “Kollywood” were MGR and Shivaji Ganesan. I have seen people queue up sometimes a day or two if not earlier, before the release of the movie for the tickets. It is history MGR went on to become the Chief Minister of Tamilnadu and was posthumously awarded the Bharat Ratna. PM NaMo’s win in the elections will look like “documentary” that ran before the mega hit “MGR Fillum”, in comparison with MGR’s win in the assembly elections while he was under treatment in a hospital at far away Boston, USA during the election campaign period and that without “Facebook”, “Twitter” “Whatsapp” et al!
The Boston hospital so impressed MGR that he suggested to his friend, a high spirited philanthropist and business man to set up a similar one here and sanctioned acres of land on the then outskirts of the state capital! This hospital grew to be one of the most sort after medical college and hospital.
When my son Saurav called late in the evening to complaint about his urine being bloody, I rushed home wondering which doctor would be available after 9 PM. I was relieved to see my son as active as he always was. But just as my wife and I decided to put off the visit to the doctor until the next morning, a nature’s call to Saurav pissed us off. It was a bloody mess! We panicked… and like any parents would we tagged it “Code Red” and rushed him this famous hospital which was just a kilometer away from my home.
The doctors and staff at the emergency ward were cool and collected. “Not to worry, sir” said one of the interns after hearing our brief “It is just urinary infection will only need some antibiotics. Please go over to the registration counter and get through with the formalities while we arrange for the test”.
The pretty looking registration clerk handed over a form to be filled up and informed me that I need to pay a total of four thousand rupees which includes the “emergency consultation fee” of Rs.1500, to be treated by a “PG Student”( as I read on the board that displayed the name of the intern who checked Saurav) who according to information has perhaps joined paying more than 10,000,000 Rupees for the “PG” course.
This was no time to asses what scholarly skills my son acquired in his commerce classes which must be pretty good I thought when he said “Achu, I am OK let us wait until tomorrow this is a rip off.” We rushed out of the hospital faster than we arrived!
The next day with just Rs 1500 that included the cost of the test, a scan, the medicines and the consultation fee, Sarauv’s treatment is on and he is recovering.
Maybe the spirits of the great philanthropist is resting in total peace and not roaming the streets in the night like some spirits and the spirited ones do as the spirit of philanthropy of the medical fraternity is being buried under a corporate medical culture born from his spirit!
__END__
