One evening, as I prepared to shut shop and head home after a rewarding day of surgery, I had a call from our emergency department that an elderly gentleman was asking to see me. He was, they said, quite sick with high blood sugar, kidney failure and low blood pressure, with sepsis resulting a severe infection in his left foot. I rushed to the ICU to find a pale and anxious looking lady clutching a smartphone, from which I could hear soft sobs. I nodded acknowledging her presence and rushed to see the elderly gentleman.
“Sudhrendran uncle’s toes will need to be amputated to save his life,” I had to declare to his 70-year-old wife, Seema.
Sudhrendran Kurup, aged 75, an affluent and socially active retired banker now spent his time tending to his rubber plantations and pepper vines in the lush environs of Kerala’s beautiful Idukki district. A man with no vices other than the comfort of an evening tipple to the soothing tunes of old Malayalam and Hindi melodies, he was like many Malayali senior citizens, a hypertensive, with as they all say, “just a touch of sugar.”
I had the privilege of knowing the couple over the past seven years as a clinician at a hospital that serves their area. They had two doting children of whom they spoke with great pride. A bright daughter, Anitha, a well published medical researcher at Cambridge and a son Anish, a senior manager at a tech giant in California. Thanks to technology, despite the distance, they had been able to establish a loving relationship with their grandchildren.
Their only ache, as Surendran uncle puts it, while trying to hide away a few tears, is not being able to hold them in his longing arms and show them the wonders hidden in his plantations that drew the English, the Dutch, the French and the Portuguese.
The sobs on the other end of an ongoing video call belonged to Anitha, who often spoke with me on video when they visited me for their consultations. I could understand her emotions as memories of a family emergency when I was an expat completing my higher education in England, flashed through my mind.
A few reassuring words, a swift operation and the expertise of our physicians helped Sudhrendran uncle get back home, still able to mange an independent life.
Anitha’s sobs that day were an honest expression of helplessness and regret at not being able to be with her parents and help. Other expats manifest the same feeling in anger and return to allege that the loss was a result of incompetent care. The sad ones are those who, insulated from emotion by distance, prefer to believe, this never happened.
While the stars of our nation take flight, the ones who launched the stars in hope of a glittering future, face a future of darkness as those stars fly away and glow brightly elsewhere. Lonely affluent elders and large locked, deserted homes are omens of a nation losing its soul. It would do this nation well, to find ways to ensure our stars are given credible platforms to herald a bright future for this nation, which has become a beacon of hope for the developing world.
Sadly, rather than create such platforms at home, leadership that chooses the easy path of encouraging migration, has already resulted in unimaginable brain drain. I once heard a political leader say that we have become the leading exporters of skilled manpower to the world. To him I say, “Our children, Sir, are not for sale!”
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