“I want to be the guy that says, ‘Australia is the best place to live’,” he said. “Now they’re like, ‘what the hell are you talking about? You can’t even go back home.'”
Back in Akula’s home city of Melbourne, Vijaya Karanam rings her parents and sister in Bangalore first thing every morning to make sure they’re OK.
The crisis in India is “very heartbreaking”, she says.
“There’s not a single-family that I know where one person hasn’t died or been very seriously affected.”
The obstetrician, who moved to Australia from the United Kingdom two years ago, says she can’t just sit and watch.
She has sprung into action, working with the Indian ex-pat group, the Overseas Medical Graduates Association, to fundraise and organize oxygen supplies.
Hearing the news that returnees would be harshly penalized was “shocking”, she says.
“We all thought that there were good relationships between India and Australia … It felt like a knee-jerk reaction which nobody saw coming.”
She understands wanting to protect Australia’s own citizens before helping other nations but says a blanket ban even on citizens returning is “a bit extreme”.
Karanam closely tracked the crisis in her “second home” of the United Kingdom, where she had friends hospitalized.
The United Kingdom reached higher case numbers per capita than India has but was never subject to such strict measures. She wants to know why people coming back from India are being treated differently.
But she’s a doctor, not a politician, and she can’t do anything about it, she says.
“What the Australian government is doing is obviously something I’m not happy with but I feel like moving on and making some difference in whatever capacity I can, rather than just being angry and complaining,” she says.
“It’s all we can do, isn’t it?”
(Edited by Vaibhav Vishwanath Pawar and Praveen Pramod Tewari. Map by Urvashi Makwana.)
