There are no IT reliefs to be got, just the chance to save a little boy's life.
While Lal Krishna Advani, Narendra Modi and a bearded long-haired man with a saffron scarf barely covering his naked torso who seems to have a TV channel all to himself were ranting about thousands of crores of rupees tucked away in Swiss banks, my thoughts were with an eight-year-old boy for whom a lakh or two would make the difference between life and death.
Sudipto Das’s father, Amit Kumar Das, sells fruit on the pavement near Calcutta’s Tollygunge Metro station. It cost him about a lakh of rupees in March 2007 for the boy’s first operation for brain tumour at that admirable institution, the Christian Medical College and Hospital in Vellore. Sudipto was operated on again a few days ago in Chennai’s Apollo Hospital where his father and mother are keeping anxious watch.
When I spoke to Das on his cell phone on Thursday he was bubbling joyfully at his son’s little signs of friskiness. Apparently, the boy had tried to push out the tube through which he was fed and kicked something — Das’s palpable excitement made hearing difficult — in bed. The best news was that Sudipto had clutched his father’s hand.
I heard of his plight on 93.5 FM radio. It’s a channel that is on almost all the time in my study, the volume turned down to provide muted background music without the ad-style wisecracks impinging on thinking. It was then that I heard, between songs and jokes, of the patient who needed four-and-a-half lakh rupees. Donations were solicited, name and cell phone number were rapped out, but in such haste that it took several sessions of patient waiting and listening, pencil in hand, before I could jot down all ten digits. My only reason for making heavy weather of the tonal effect is that the smartness almost sabotaged 93.5 FM’s highly commendable generosity. Each plea for funds ended with “Have a heart”.
Das tells me that friends who dropped in on Holi to play with colours put on their thinking caps when they found him sorrowing about his son’s illness. As they chatted, someone remembered that 93.5 FM had helped out in another case. A telephone call led to an invitation to visit the radio station with Sudipto’s medical reports. The papers were examined and xeroxed, and Jimmy Kangri, the station chief, readily agreed to make the announcement I heard.
They didn’t charge a paise. Not only that. Das tells me gratefully that Kangri gave him Rs 20,000 from his own pocket while Sibashis Dhar, the sympathetic young system administrator whose cellphone music — Harry Belafonte’s Jamaica Farewell — takes me back to my own youth in the England of the fifties, produced another Rs 10,000. It was also a personal gift. Compared to that auspicious beginning, the response to the broadcasts has not been enthusiastic. Das, who used up his savings to travel to Chennai and lives there from bill to bill, says donations trickle in slowly. A thousand rupees here, a couple of thousand there. No magnanimous listener has come forward to say “Four-and-a-half lakhs is a fleabite! Here’s the full amount.”
There are many reasons for parsimony. Times are hard. Those with assets and investments who can normally afford to be generous feel the pinch more than people with steady salaries but little to spare. Father and son are not registered charities. Giving to them earns no Income Tax relief, which is a consideration with the rich. Probably only ageing layabouts like newspaper columnists have the time and inclination to listen to 93.5 FM. Also, blood is thicker than water, especially in India. Everyone knows of the politician who was asked why he had showered such lucrative commissions on his son. “If I don’t do it for my son whose son should I do it for? Yours?” he retorted. Variations of that tale have been going around for decades, testifying to the strength of family bonds.
Finally, our worthies are obsessed with the big picture. Dazzled by Switzerland, Zurich, numbered accounts and billions of dollars, they have no time for modest local causes or humble rupees. But those who haven’t been swept off their feet by folie de grandeur know that charity begins at home. Saluting Kangri, Dhar and 93.5 FM, they will spare a thought for little Sudipto battling for his life. He needs it to survive.
His father will never read this column. But his mobile number is 9874490387. Any branch of the State Bank of India will happily receive cheques for Das’s Account number 20022655001 (Code 11533).
