Matters of life, death, and makeup

As I boarded my 3:25 am flight home from Bangalore, I picked up an English language Indian newspaper. On the front page, above the fold, was a story about a woman who had died Thursday night after being turned away from a hospital in Kolkata. The 40-year old woman had given birth to twins on the street earlier in the night, and after her husband was finally able to get a cab to drive them to the nearest government hospital, she was refused admittance. The government hospital recommended she try another hospital, which likewise refused her and sent her back to the first. The article said that the incident was “under investigation.”

Looking up from the paper, the lovely Lufthansa flight attendants in their pageant-style make up reminded me of something that Ajay Bakshi, CEO at Max Healthcare, had said to us last week. “We don’t just hire the prettiest girl to sit at the front desk like you might see at some place like Fortis or Apollo (two of the largest private hospital chains in India); we hire someone who can actually help you and get your questions answered.”

As if I hadn’t already been hit over the head enough times with this idea of the “two Indias” during the seminar, here it was again! But the contrast between the private hospital’s capacity to focus on something as superficial as the good looks of their desk attendants and the incompetence of the public hospital being so profound that it would deny care to a woman who is bleeding to death after childbirth, for me translates all the imagery and statistics we have been absorbing over the last couple of weeks into their true meaning. The inequity that pervades every aspect of society in the two Indias is a matter of life or death for the majority of the population; it makes the complaints of our 99% look like pretty small beans.

The fact that the incident was front page news at least is encouraging. I have found stories about it online in other major English-language, Indian papers as well. The Times of India reports that the first hospital has claimed that “the allegation is the handiwork of some news channels” and there is no record that the husband ever showed up at their door. The babies, underweight and suffering from exposure, have since been admitted to the same government hospital that first turned their mother away. I wonder if in their lifetime a story like this will become as inconceivable to them as it is to me.