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.