(6 Jun 10)
The woman who sat
across my table handed me a couple of newspaper cuttings stating that the mobile-phone
towers radiated horrid cancer-causing rays. She said she’d done some blood
tests to check the radiation levels in her body and they were ‘ok’. But someone
told her that this hospital had some special tests for checking whether they
were making her cells/tissues/organs malignant and she came to make doubly sure
she was not going to die of cancer. I was curious: what did she want to die of…
she looked about my age, in her mid-fifties. I checked with our labs: no, there
was no test that could for sure say that a person would not die of cancer. I
then checked with our radiation oncologists and they told me to tell her not to
worry, the radiation from the mentioned towers were non-ionizing (she’d have to
look up the dictionary and then ask someone to explain further what that
means). They would do her no harm.
I’m quite, quite
definite that she, like many others, is going to check on what will give her a
heart problem, osteoporosis, stroke, kidney failure, wrinkles, etc, and work on
her food habits to avoid all of them. She will turn every brinjal, pea-pod and
green chilly to make sure it’s free from visible defects. She will tune in to
the various television channels to make sure her spiritual side is enriched
either with yoga or special modern breathing techniques or ancient chants or
wearing magnetic wrist-bands or drinking karela-juice.
Every ‘free’ camp that
we conduct has regulars. One of the reasons they come is for the chai-nashta.
The other is that they ‘gain knowledge’ through our awareness programs. Over a
period of time, they become experts. How often do we hear people say they know
everything about so-and-so disease/medicine because they’ve read it on the net.
I sometimes feel our doctors waste their time slogging for their degrees (uh,
some of them waste their money buying certificates) when they could/should have
browed one free site after another. There are those who will ask what they
consider tricky questions, which the specialists consider irritating ones,
because answering them involves a series of but whys…. Responded to with ‘aha…
you know what, I read that the side effects are…’. There’s a ‘gotcha’ in their
superior tones. They attend cataract camps, diabetes check-up camps, pulse-drop
Sunday dos, hernia camps, stroke awareness programs, cardiac programs,
everything and anything concerning health. Including weight-loss and
music-can-cure and magic-herb-extract demonstrations.
Even in the tea-time of
my life, I wonder, what is it that these people fear? I saw how many doctors,
technicians, nurses and managers flocked around one particular patient’s
husband: he was a palmist. And I remembered one of the most entertaining
writing assignments I’ve ever done. I had to write the full year’s predictions
for all the zodiac signs, and then for the Chinese signs. I’m a non-believer
when it comes to see-the-future, but a job that paid wasn’t to be scoffed at.
So I read a couple of cheap books on the topic that I picked off the streets…
some a couple of years old, and found that I could conjure up
your-stars-this-week by doing a couple of combinations: gastric trouble with
romance in the air; family trouble with job opportunity; children-trouble with
unexpected good fortune; partner-trouble with travel-abroad. I had a great time
exercising my imagination, and an even better time trying to figure out how
many had lived their lives that year based on my creative little paragraphs.
There are people who
love to exchange symptoms: “You have sugar? Me, too. Diabetes.” There are those
who will moan over perfectly normal physiological functions: “I’m such-and-such
age and still get my periods.” This is beautifully countered by: “I’ve going
through my menopause. So much suffering, you know.” Smart doctors make money
thanks to this kind. They want a sympathetic ear, and they’re willing to pay
for it. They swallow placebos, and they pay for those just as happily. What a
win-win situation.
What happens, I wonder,
to those who wait and wait for something to go wrong, and nothing does? They
worry that their kids will go astray, and the kids go straight. They worry that
the finances will dry up, they multiply. They worry that they will land in
hospital beds, and get nothing more than the common cold every alternate year.
I guess they spend long years in bitter disappointment. Such a contrast to the
smiley, happy types who toil and slog through turmoil and trouble, bravely,
without a fuss.
Takes all kinds to make
a world. Without the moaners, could/would literature be written?
@@@@@
No comments:
Post a Comment