KHOON CHALA

I worked as a health reporter with a prestigious news channel in India for a while. Lets call the channel X TV. Health was an accidental choice for me...actually since I was 16 I have accidentally gotten involved in various Health projects. In college I once did a study on the space given to health issues in three English National Dailies, considered by most to be a drab project, and I will not lie, that included me. How could it possibly match up to more exciting and colorful projects on advertising, TV shows etc etc.

I did this daily sponsored segment on health. The operative word here is sponsored, so irrespective of what the authorities at the channel thought of my stories, they had to be aired, unless they preferred losing money. So, I the idealist fresher, just out of college did stories that I thought had to be told. One of the first diseases that I encountered, was Japanese Encephalitis. I was about a week old in the organization, so I put together reports sent by journos in North-Eastern part of Uttar Pradesh. Day after day after I saw images of dead children. How many children died?? The exact figures are debatable, but they were in thousands. And the disease was a recurrent one, showing its ugly face every alternate year. Also a disease that had been curbed successfully in other parts of the country and South East Asia, where it occurred. What was then stopping the government here? One of the easiest solutions was distributing medicated bed nets since people get JE when they are bitten by rice field breeding mosquitoes infected with the JE virus. Or by segregating pigs from the families that owned them, because the JE virus amplifies in the blood of domestic pigs. The story remained in the news for a while, as it took a political turn, with the ruling party's commander-in-chief paying a visit to the affected areas...and slowly it died down. But this was just the beginning of my learning. Soon every day was a new disease, a new virus, a new bacteria and just understanding the medical terms took so much of my energy that I didn't have anytime to feel outraged, sad..nothing. One day the wife of the owner of the channel called me into her office and said " how old are you my child?". She was a grandmotherly, kind looking lady. I said I as xx years old. She asked me why my stories featured so many dead, dying children? " Why not do more on medical breakthroughs? Latest medical fads etc". I thought about it, I thought if my reasons would satisfy her. I said there were more children dying, than there were medical breakthroughs. That medical breakthroughs are not easy to achieve and that there are some billion testing stages that have to be passed before a breakthrough is announced by the researchers themselves. That the diseases that kill these kids are easily preventable. That our health infrastructure needs to be revamped and that requires more monetary efforts. But more than that, it requires a will on all our parts. And that each of us should do what our skills allow us, and my skill is telling a story.

To a great extent, I lacked and probably still lack the ability to explain why health is a much ignored subject in the Indian Media and the Indian government. The government spends around 1% of its GDP on health, which though a very small percent, it is a huge amount, which if used properly and honestly, can do much more than it is right now.

Does all this sound like ideal talk? perhaps it does. I know lot of doctors who leave India for greener pastures abroad. Our medicos our not treated very well, earning a lot less than many other professionals.I also know many journalists who leave India for greener pastures. I am one of them. I am a hypocrite to a great extent. I ran away from the problems that I could not solve. I believe that I will go back, I know that I belong there. But till I do that, I remain a hypocrite.

One editorial column recently questioned where is India's Obama? I believe India can't have one Obama, that each one of us is an Obama. Each Manjunath or Malleshwari or Rajendra Singh is an Obama. That every filmmaker who can make a film like Swades or Rang De Basanti ( at the risk of being cheesy) is an Obama. Everyone who tries is an Obama, because we as a nation never gave credit to politicians for our success. Because we are a very young nation. Because we have forgotten to be more optimistic, because we are scared to believe that changes can be good. They believed in 1857, 1942 and 1947.

I believe now...so should you.

BUUUURRRUUUMMMMMMM

My way of explaining recession, unemployment, rice shortage and the general state of madness prevailing on this planet!!

New York City is a beautiful place. In summers you can escape the searing heat by taking refuge in its many parks...more than 1700, says the city government web-site. Well so it happened that when I finally understood the gravity of recession , one sunny bright NY afternoon, I happened to be sitting under a tree , in a park close to school...and was very intently following a squirrel...when suddenly the squirrel turned around started talking to about rising prices... more specifically rising food
prices. It should be noted that rising food prices can be of great interest to a poor graduate student -10 pounds basmati rice cost 23 bucks. Anyway, so the squirrel asked me how I felt about rising pricing and thus began a conversation about how the cost of rice and nuts was just ...well nuts!!

After a while, the squirrel told me that it needed a buck more to buy the required amount of nuts needed to feed his family ( we need to establish the gender of the squirrel here, it is pivotal to rest of the story) and asked if I could give him that one buck. Now I am a very reasonable and poor person and so I told the squirrel - "Listen pal...you are not handicapped, why don't you learn some skills that will aid you in earning the money required to feed your family?" Mr. Squirrel then divulged that he was actually a trained singer and dancer ... and used to do this whole routine in a squirrel club called "NUT CLUB"...the gig included a strip routine and the squirrel was a big hit with the ladies...but then recession hit and the club owner had to cut down on spending and started sacking squirrels left right and center and our little squirrel here also got the red envelope. To add to his woes his wife left him and their kids and went off with another stripper squirrel who had not been sacked. So here I was on a bright and sunny New York afternoon feeling really sad for the squirrel but still did not want to encourage begging. So I said to the squirrel " why don't you do your song and dance routine for me , minus the stripping, and if at the end of your performance i feel entertained enough, I will give you not one but ten dollars". So the unfortunate squirrel, his life stripped naked by the cruelty of the capitalist society, sang and danced for the sake of his kids...and he sang "burrrruuummm, burruuuummmm, buurrruum, burrumm, burruuuuumm."


Footnote: Thank you S for encouraging me to write this on my blog and thank you V for reminding me it's called a footnote.