PICK THESE SCRIPS

Nobody likes to go to a hospital, that’s something obvious unless you have to visit someone, unless you really don’t have a choice like if you are a doctor or a nurse or some lab technician. But I have realized over the past couple of months in the midst of difficult circumstances that these are the places that have become money spinners. The topic of discussion here are the private hospitals, the ones that are run as corporate entities.
The objective of any corporate entity is profit. They exist for profit, no two ways about that. But then hospitals are not the same as a company providing hospitality services; or a company selling mobile phones. They have to cater to patients, sick people, sometimes very sick people who could be as dejected, as much as their families are in a state of financial and emotional turmoil due to their sickness.
The point am trying to make here is that the profit motive of the corporate hospitals is fine but they have to be considerate keeping in mind the possibly distressed condition of the patients and the extreme anguish caused to their families.
The state of public health care system in India is well known. It’s in pretty bad shape and caters mostly to patients who are from the lower rung of the society who simply cannot afford even a single day’s expenditure in an average private hospital. Needless to say most government hospitals in the country are over crowded and are run in such a manner that an average educated Indian with an average salary would think many times before stepping into one. The scenario is well set for privately run hospitals to flourish in our country.
Am not going to bore people with details of my personal tragedy but here is an outline of what happened-My grandmother had a heart attack and she was admitted to a well known private hospital. It was a mild attack and a first one and the doctors very clearly said surgery was ruled out considering the old age of the patient. One day she actually had to be revived -the docs keep massaging and pressing the chest till the heart started beating again. She was kept in the ICU for a couple of weeks and in 30 days time since she was admitted to the hospital, Rs.3,00,000 literally flew out of the door. True, medical care in India is expensive but then the average cost here comes to Rs.10,000 a day and there was not even a surgery involved here. UNBELIEVABLE. This was when I realized something:

1. A hospital is one place where you are utterly helpless especially if your near and dear is admitted to one for you can never question them about any of their procedures as to why so many medicines have to be bought or why a patient has to remain in ICU for weeks together. You can only trust them with your loved one.
2. Yes. They do take good care of the patients. The doctors do explain the illness and complications involved but at the end of the day you are left with a HUGE bill.A ridiculously huge one. When a huge bill is levied at a different place say a restaurant or at any other place you get to read it, question the logics of it. But in a hospital you can never ever do that. If the doctor’s fees come to Rs. 50,000 you can only gape at it. You nevertheless have to pay it.
3. Do they look at this as an opportunity to skim a nice profit by charging atrociously? This is debatable.

But looking at the numbers mentioned above I don’t think the debate would last long. I would certainly love to have a look these companies oops hospitals Balance sheets. They would make an interesting study. Also there is something more interesting here:

1. It is estimated that by 2025, India will be number one in the world (Now now pl read on fully) with the maximum number of people with diabetes. At the moment the number is 30 million people with diabetes.
2. Researchers say India, a country with more than one billion people, will likely account for 60 per cent of heart disease patients worldwide, by 2010.
3. According to WHO studies there are more than 24 lakh cancer cases in India and India will have 8 lakh new cancer cases every year.
4. With the increasingly changing life style of young Indians especially in the IT and ITES sectors ,there would be a spurt in the lifestyle diseases-chronic diseases like heart disease, stroke, cancer, diabetes and respiratory infections - which are ailments of long duration and slow progression.

If you have read till here what are you waiting for now. Go ahead and invest in the scrips of these corporate hospitals. If they come out with an IPO pounce on it for you know the analysis now. The ‘fundamentals’ are pretty strong and there is enormous potential for ‘growth’ in the future and the ‘business model’ if I can call it that would most certainly lead to increased ‘profitability’.

Am not a communist and profit making and all is fine (I work for a prominent private concern as well) but at what cost. This is thoroughly sickening.

The curious case of Slumdog millionaire

I watched this movie Slumdog millionaire(SM).It was a good movie all right, very well directed with a good screenplay and background score. However I have seen a lot of INDIAN MOVIES which were many times better than what this movie was. I would like to stress on the phrase INDIAN MOVIES because SM (as a lot of people are either not aware of or conveniently choose to ignore) is not an Indian movie. It is a movie which had Indian actors and quite a few Indian technicians in it. It was a foreigner's take on what India was and supposedly presented to an equally foreign audience.

And what Danny Boyle had portrayed about India is not untrue but neither is it something that should make us feel proud or rather 'Inspire India' as certain sections of the media has put forth. Maybe am saying this because I am an Indian and the movie had been made by a British filmmaker but overall I think India had been portrayed in this movie as a land of slums, gangsters and call centers and the English speaking audiences apparently liked what they saw.

What the hell are these Oscars anyway? They certainly aren’t some kind of a benchmark, that’s for sure. Otherwise the maestro that A.R.Rahman is, he would have won a lot of them already. His scores in this movie were certainly very good but he had composed much better scores in the past for much better movies and how is it that those works were never considered for Oscars. Now am not mentioning this for the sake of comparison but a Bombay or Roja directed by Mani Ratnam were such incredible movies that they left a lot of us Indians gaping and so did the musical scores that Rahman had composed for those movies and it had made him a household name and also fetched him national awards, but its only now that some foreign audiences have realized what a wonder this man was and had honored him with an Oscar all because this movie SM had been lapped up by the English speaking audiences.

It just goes to show within what kind of narrow confines that these academy awards are given.But without taking away anything from A.R.Rahman who deserves all the awards that exist for his extraordinary brilliance, there is nothing here for India as a nation to cheer about as our media claims. It’s akin to saying that the whole of America would cheer if Steven Spielberg was to be honored with a National award of India for his incredible film making prowess. Can you ever imagine such a scenario!

For god's sake....

If you have been to temples in Tamil Nadu(Am not sure about other places),there is a spectacle you would have most certainly noticed.This is that of the 'special darshan' or whatever name by which its called.The system here is ,if you have got the money to spare,you get a shortcut to view the deity.What a wonderful idea!! And to think we were all equal in the eyes of god.

So we have different categories here,the more you spend(lets say you buy an Rs.250 'ticket' instead of an Rs.100 'ticket'),the shorter is the route or waiting time to view the deity.Can anything be more incredulous?If crowd control is the idea then certainly something more innovative can be done to handle that.This,I believe is a system which promotes inequality in a society already torn apart and divided by lopsided growth.Agreed,money guarantees better and prompt service almost everywhere but visiting a temple is a completely different scenario and a temple is not a goddamn restaurant where you can pay more for better service.If people are in such a hurry and they are so damn busy that they cant wait in a queue to pray to whom they believe as god,if they cant respect the other individuals who are waiting in a queue for a longer time that they feel they can barge in by paying some extra money,these people are completely unworthy of any kind of faith that they possess and they dont deserve to visit a temple at all.

Even to those who are reading this blog now,this wouldn't seem to be a big deal at all and that exactly is the worst part of this social evil,the society sees no harm in it and it's being encouraged.

The other day,I visited a prominent temple in a town which is supposed to be the home to one of the most well known temples in the state.When we(I was acompanied by a couple of my colleagues) were inside the temple,one of the guys who had accompanied me gestured us to wait and disappeared somewhere with his mobile phone.He got back after some 20 minutes with a triumphant smile and a slip in his hand and guided us inside.The temple was fairly crowded since it was an auspicious day and while I was wondering how long we would spend in the rather lenghty queue,this colleague of mine had a word with the guy manning the crowd and that guy after having a look at the slip produced by my colleague opened the side gate and let us inside and by the time I grasped what has happened,we had bypassed the long line of devotees standing there and had gone right inside the 'sannidhi' and we hadn't even purchased the special darshan 'ticket' coz that colleague of mine it seemed had some relative in the temple trust and he had used his name(written on that slip) to gain access straightaway. (making a mockery of other devotees standing there for probably an hour or more)

When we came out,this person who had used his 'influence' to take us inside commented that it was satisfying that we had a great 'darshan'.I felt thoroughly disgusted.Forget the inequality in society caused by purchasing darshan tickets inside temples,what this guy had done was a completely despicable act and he was a properly educated guy of the twentieth century and to top it all he felt that he had accomplished something.I just put myself in the shoes of one of the devotees who was standing in the queue while we had cooly walked past him.I felt anger.

God save our nation.