Never demanding Equal Rights,
She became family’s Queen Mother,
Laying down Rule of Living,
That became sacrosanct quite later.
Knowing well how to read or write,
She read all big-wigs of literature,
Her knowledge’s by no means low,
Pure heart was raised her stature.
No guest were sent back sans food,
No near-dear ones’re badly treated,
Whole floor became a dining table,
Father’s king…never to be un-seated.
Stickler for every item of food,
She herself did all marketing and cooking,
Never asking neigbours for recipe,
Care’s what she’s never found overlooking.
When my dad became a doctor,
She became a willing compounder,
Sometime a junior doctor or nurse,
Asking patients not to speak louder.
They joked or stayed or played together,
Whenever both were not doing well in the life,
Not given to glamorous way of living,
Plain living, high thinking marked husband-wife
PREAMBLE OF POEM
Even though fighting for the freedom of India from British Rule, my father ironically got his first job in a once-world-renowned British MNC. Over the years, he had sold company’s medicine which included one for epilepsy.
He never imagined that one day same malady will strike his last son and was aghast to recall his training to the effect that disease was incurable and would require life-long management. But the medicine had its side-effect of creating suicide syndromes. One day I began weeping and asked him to start his medication. Not convinced with my reason, he did try to argue with me but failed.
He immediately began dabbling in alternate system of medication. He gave his medicines but instructed to carry on medicines suggested what our family physician had suggested. Latter medicines never succeeded stopping fits, but combination of modern medicines with traditional variants did wonder and in a flat one month succeeded in stopping fit altogether for all time to come till this year. No less was the untiring efforts of my mother who did all nursing and kept alive in me the faith in god and my father’s medicines.
In fact, I was always flummoxed to notice later that, barring three weeks, I never needed any allopathic medicines at all.
It was only recently when I saw the video of renowned Doctor from India B.M Hegde, I could know the reason as to why my father’s medicine worked.
A friend of mine cited WHO study which found that western system of medicines was as good as any other systems: Tibetan System of Medicine, Chinese System of Medicine, Integrated Chinese System of Medicine, Hereditary System of Medicine (Father tells son and so on), downright Quackery (Registered Medical Practitioners).
One indeed wished to castigate him for creating a no-hope situation when he goes on to add that neither surgery nor medicine helps body heal itself. It is your body’s immune system that will decide the healing. Then he goes on to tell that it is tender-love-care (TLC) that helps fire one’s immune system. Sympathy and empathy are the best tools towards this end.
Obviously Florence Nightingale did much better job in healing wounded soldiers than more glamorous doctors or surgeons. There is lot of scope of hope for everyone in the society to handle suicide-prone ones. My another poem titled Dilemma of Death (Why favour it ?) no wonder attempted to reflect all these reasoning. It tried to reason with suicide-prone one that there was no heroic in death and it is life which gives lot of opportunities of heroics.
