KABULIWALAH

Meet Kamali Bai.

You can see her in the picture sitting right in the middle with a maroon dupatta. She is from Village Kural in Pali District of Rajasthan.  She is a Pashu Sakhi which literally translated means a Friend of Animals. And that is correct. In a village which is primarily dependent on growing maize, they have now with the help of local NGO been able to raise healthy goats which can be sold for meat. You may wonder…how cruel! This income helps them in a big way to raise about Rs 10,000 to Rs 12,000 in a year and take their annual income from a paltry Rs 33,000 to Rs 45,000. This part of India after 68 years of Independence is in a remote place which you and I will not otherwise visit but small changes are now visible. They today have hand pumps and do not have to travel miles in search of water. An electric line is there giving them hope that there will be power some day. While men work in the fields, women folk, after the household chores and taking care of the goats, have come together and formed self help groups contributing about Rs 30 per month and helping each other in times of need.

Kamali Bai was a promising young girl who with her grit and determination studied till class 5…incidentally there are no schools in the village. She would have gone ahead with further studies but social and financial problems prevented her progress. When the NGO came to the village 2 years ago, they identified Kamali and trained her. She now has the work of going from house to house telling the tribal folk about vaccinations, feeding habits and all other things which will help them reduce goat mortality, make them healthy which in turn will help them get better price. She has charts and a calendar to show things pictorially. What caught my attention when I saw her was a sparkle in her eyes, the determination in her voice and the confidence in her work despite her shy demeanor.  Kamali had an instrument in her hand which looked like a clamp…..foolishly I asked what it was. She blushed for once and my friend there told me that this equipment is used to castrate the goats!!! Castrated goats weigh heavier than others and get the villagers better return. Not all goats are castrated. The NGO there have brought in better goats from Sirohi District. So in order to maintain the quality of the better breed, the local ones have to bear the clamp…..40 years ago we too had this clamp working at great speed during the Emergency!

Kamali Bai is the ‘Veterinary Doctor’ of the village and I hope progress and development reaches Kural and many more villages and we have more Dr. Kamalis in every village.

Meet Chinamma.

 She is 8 years old and studying in a Corporation School in Chennai. Her father is a sweeper and she has 3 siblings. I met her recently during my visit to the school where there was an annual kit distribution ceremony organized by an NGO. This is an annual program where the girl child is given a new school bag which contains note books, stationery items, a rain coat and some undergarments. All this is to encourage the girls to come to the school more often and continue with their education. There were many like Chinamma who were excited for they were to perform before us a couple of dances, followed by speeches and then the kit distribution was to take place. 

As luck would have it, the same morning the electrical box of the school got burnt down and there was no power… how would they dance? They had been preparing for days now and they looked sad. One of the school teachers quickly had the presence of mind and used her cell phone and connected it to the speaker…Super Instant Indian ‘Jugaad’. For one song another teacher sang…I’m a Barbie Girl as two kids danced in merriment.  Speaking in Tamil is not my forte, in fact ,except Vannakam ,whatever little SRK taught us in Chennai Express is of little use. So I spoke in English and my colleague translated it in Tamil after every sentence. She must have done a good job for my otherwise simple talk was getting a huge applause after translation.

Chinamma danced beautifully and then sat down in one corner waiting for everything to get over. I noticed she was smiling all through the program and then when the final pictures were being taken she walked up to all four of the guests and offered each one a simple toffee. I was taken aback. Here I was thinking of doing great service and donating for the poor kids on behalf of my company and here comes a little Nanhi Kali who had taken that extra effort to take out some money and buy toffees for us. It hit me hard. Generosity and goodness is not in how much you have in your bank accounts and wallets but the thought in your mind and the good heart within that truly matter.

I blessed her and asked Chinamma what would you want to be when you grow up. She bowed her head, smiled a little and said, “A Doctor”.….Dr. Chinamma MBBS, her board would read, I thought, as I tasted the Best Toffee in the World.

Meet Dr.Anita.  

She is a resident doctor at KEM Hospital, Mumbai. You may not know her but she was in news recently. She was speaking about the life of a resident doctor in the civic hospital. She was speaking to news reporters after one of her colleagues had tried to commit suicide for being unable to take the work load. Dr. Anita said that residents are expected to put in twice a week 30 hours of non-stop emergency duty plus on all the remaining 5 days they have such work load which gives them only a couple of hours to sleep. They hardly go to their dingy hostel rooms and many a times just find an empty bed somewhere to catch up on a couple of minutes of much needed sleep. It is both surprising and sad to know a majority of them are on anti-depressants!

To add to this is the other worry of security and dignity. The other day a patient’s relative slapped an urologist, who is doing her post doctoral training , while she was preparing for an operation just because she had asked the relative to wait for some reports… Ms Barkha Dutt never loses a minute on a dog being killed in some outpost in Manipur, Rahul Kanwar will make you weep just because the government has planned to ban child porn and yet Arnab for once does not want to know, neither India wants to know the sad state of doctors and their lives. How easily we pay the plumber Rs 500 for touching our Jaguar tap which is not working properly or a TV mechanic Rs 1000 for telling you that the set needs to be replaced but if a doctor were to charge the same amount for his consultation we feel so robbed and cheated…Chor hai …

Will Dr. Anita and her tribe get a better fate in coming days?

Meeting the three Doctors- Kamli, Chinamma and Anita, I too remembered my Little Doctor who is fifteen hundred kilometers away. Here I was , a modern day Kabuliwalah, working my way at another city, another world I  I opened up my albums and profile pictures in the FB and WhatsApp, saw her smiling face…My Khokhi must now be a grown up girl managing everything all alone…when will I see her again…

SS

(PS. Real names of protagonists have been changed. All pictures are original except the doctor which is taken from the net)