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Living with Pain

The smell of pain and death is in the air. It overwhelms me, pursues me wherever I go these days.

I have spent many hours at the Hinduja Hospital during the past week, where my mother, a frail 88, has been admitted after a fall in the bathroom, which has left her with a painful hip fracture that needs serious surgical intervention if she is to ever get up from her bed.

The problem is not the surgery, for some of the finest doctors are at the Hinduja Hospital. The problem is the delicate state of her health. That had to be set right before any surgery could take place. Her pressure was high; the kidneys were malfunctioning after the fall; her mind was wandering. Irregular heartbeats and lung fibrosis further complicated matters. All these needed quick correction before she could be operated upon. Luckily, she has been responding to treatment and some of the more crucial clinical parameters have been met. So the operation is on. In fact, even as I write this column, sitting in the waiting room of the ICU on the third floor of the hospital, Dr Sanjay Agarwala is operating upon her.

All around me are friends and relatives of patients in a critical state. Worried, sad, lonely people. Lonely in their grief. Yet what amazes one is the kind of bonding that takes place out here, where every individual is fighting his or her own desperate battle against destiny and death. As my daughter Ishita who has spent most nights out here over the past week will tell you, this place is like a community by itself. A community bonded by pain, fear, anxiety, grief and yet hope. Where everyone has his or her own sorry tale to tell and yet dares to dream of defying despair, conquering adversity.

This is a community where no one has an age, a religion, a caste, a gender. People eat together, share their sorrows, drink from each other's bottles of mineral water while they wait for their fathers and mothers, their brothers and sisters, friends and spouses to return from the operating theatre, scarred but victorious. Most do. Proving the amazing advancement in medical science that has taken place in recent years. But many don't. Death claims its victims irrespective of age, disease, faith, caste, community, sex and, when it does, they all mourn as one. Because everyone knows what it means to lose someone you love, you have lived with for years.

The conversations here are also very interesting. No one is worried about whether Manohar Joshi has gone and Narayan Rane has come in as chief minister, if India has lost the Test to Pakistan or not, or what the outcome of the Strobe Talbot, Jaswant Singh talks will be and whether we ought to sign the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. Their concerns are far more basic, far more real and immediate.

Why did these goons of the Bajrang Dal, led by this history sheeter called Dara Singh, burn Graham Stains and his two sons, 7 and 9 years old? What did they ever hope to gain by killing a harmless, 58-year-old Australian missionary who had worked for 34 years among leprosy patients in one of the poorest tribal districts of India and had never ever converted a single one of them to his religion? Why did the Ranvir Sena suddenly attack and kill 23 dalits in Jehanabad, Bihar for no reason whatsoever? Why did they slaughter five women and nine children, one of them barely six months old who was fast asleep? The village they attacked was poor and had no electricity, no roads, not even a small dhaba. What were these goons trying to prove by killing these poor creatures who were, in any case, eking out their miserable lives as social outcasts? Why is the Vishwa Hindu Parsishad in Gujarat attacking churches? What do they ever hope to gain by terrorising a community that does not believe in striking back?

That is the issue I found most of them discussing among themselves. The issue that concerns, in fact worries most Indians today as it did Ashoka after the Kalinga war and Gandhi after the Noakhali riots. Do we need to build a society based on hate and prejudice and needless, recurring violence? We are an amazing nation of amazing people who have achieved spectacular success through talent and hard work and what you might call business prescience. In any one year, you will find at least half a dozen world-class heroes emerging. Why do we need to attract headlines by terror and bloodshed? Isn't it time we settled down to the more exciting task of building India?

In the past one year, a little-known businessman called Azim Premji, working out of Bangalore, increased his wealth by over Rs 100 billion simply by running his company honestly and well. Wipro today has a higher market capitalisation than Telco and Tisco put together. You will realise the extent of Premji's achievement when you look at the figures five years back, when Telco and Tisco were Indian's two largest companies. Today Wipro has left them far behind in market capitalisation.

In fact, Wipro increased in its market cap by over Rs 75 billion in just one month, without the slightest hint of a scam. What is even more interesting, Wipro's increase in market cap over one day (January 13) was Rs 10.38 billion, which is more than the market cap of the entire R P Goenka group, assessed at Rs 9.65 billion and the B K Birla group, assessed at Rs 8.82 billion. If you add to that its growth in market cap of Rs 11.22 billion the very next day (January 14), Wipro amassed Rs 21.60 billion in two days, which is 20.2 per cent more than the combined market cap of the RP Goenka and BK Birla groups. In fact, Wipro has now left even Dhirubhai Ambani's Reliance behind. All this, in a year when the stock market has done badly.

Wipro and Premji are no exceptions. The performance of companies like Satyam and Infosys have been as spectacular, led as they are by corporate visionaries who have come from nowhere and conquered as it were the world of Indian enterprise. On the international scene, Hotmail and Junglee have shown the extraordinary genius of NRI entrepreneurs. In sports, Sachin Tendulkar has shown how Indian sportsmen with virtually no State support, no encouragement can become No 1s in their field. In fact, the Indian hockey team, which won the gold medal at the Asian Games after 32 years found that, instead of winning accolades, its top six players were axed, including the brilliant Dhunraj Pillai who captained India to victory! In movies, Shekhar Kapur who was not exactly doing spectacularly in Bollywood went abroad and bagged five Golden Globe nominations with his very first international film, Elizabeth. While young Karan Johar, 26, found that his first feature film, Kuch Kuch Hota Hai not only earned him a profit more than what his producer father had earned in an entire lifetime financing movies but also, surprise surprise, made it to the top ten grossers in the UK. Rumours are that it made a profit of 2000 per cent!

I could give you countless more examples. In business. In entertainment. In sports. In music. In medical sciences. You name it and we produce the best talent in the world in most critical areas. Except, alas, one. Political leadership.

We are a first-rate nation led by fourth-rate politicians who are greedy, sanctimonious, irresponsible humbugs. People who have led India to the brink. Who have driven a great society, a great culture, a great nation into moral bankruptcy, into violence and turmoil, into savage hatred. The pretexts are many. Caste, community, poverty, social inequality, injustice. Yet India continues to grow, to emerge richer and stronger, more accomplished by the day. It is just that we do not know how to use this strength to our advantage, how to win the war against prejudice and poverty and political exploitation and, unless we learn this skill, India will remain mired in its grief, its pain, its endless night of sorrow.

And, for this, we have only our political leaders to blame. Whatever party they may come from.

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