A Luxury Called Health
Kavery Nambisan
My Rating - 5/5 Stars
India is a country of staggering inequality. It is a fact which is much more apparent in the general ward of a government hospital. The author says that a brief visit to one will tell you everything about the healthcare available to poor. In a country where getting two square meals is arduous for most of them, can they manage when struck by grave illness? Or is health, perhaps their only resource, also a luxury unaffordable for them.
Kavery Nambisan, a doctor and an author, who has been a rural surgeon for most of her life, through this book attempts to bring our attention to the basic healthcare that must be the right of every citizen of this country irrespective of class. She studied medicine and surgery at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore and then went onto get a Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons from London. This book, her memoir, is her first work of non-fiction.
A Luxury Called Health is not just a memoir. It is also a commentary on and a critique of the state of healthcare in India. Nambisan’s decision to return and then to serve as a surgeon in the rural areas of her own country is a testimony of her commitment towards the service which demands complete devotion. Her words echo with integrity, exemplifying her allegiance to her vocation. When she expresses concern over the low percentage of budget allocated to health care or the dismal infrastructure available in government run hospitals, the urgency of her call finds its way to the reader.
Being concerned about the increasing corporatisation of Medical Services in India, which has made good health services much expensive and out of reach of the middle class and the poor, she advocates the concept of Universal Health Care. Her suggestions are based on the system of National Health Scheme as offered by Britain to its citizens as well as on the efficiency of health care systems of countries like Germany, China, Russia, Spain, Cuba, Malaysia and Sri Lanka who seem to be doing better than countries like US and India. Her anxiety over miserable condition of health system in India reverberates with an earnestness which is sadly missing from the present national discourse. Though COVID did bring some attention to the terrifying reality of our incapacity to tackle pandemic like situations, it still hasn’t transformed into any visible effective change.
The complete review appears here:
Kavery Nambisan, a doctor and an author, who has been a rural surgeon for most of her life, through this book attempts to bring our attention to the basic healthcare that must be the right of every citizen of this country irrespective of class. She studied medicine and surgery at St. John’s Medical College in Bangalore and then went onto get a Fellowship of the Royal College of Surgeons from London. This book, her memoir, is her first work of non-fiction.
A Luxury Called Health is not just a memoir. It is also a commentary on and a critique of the state of healthcare in India. Nambisan’s decision to return and then to serve as a surgeon in the rural areas of her own country is a testimony of her commitment towards the service which demands complete devotion. Her words echo with integrity, exemplifying her allegiance to her vocation. When she expresses concern over the low percentage of budget allocated to health care or the dismal infrastructure available in government run hospitals, the urgency of her call finds its way to the reader.
Being concerned about the increasing corporatisation of Medical Services in India, which has made good health services much expensive and out of reach of the middle class and the poor, she advocates the concept of Universal Health Care. Her suggestions are based on the system of National Health Scheme as offered by Britain to its citizens as well as on the efficiency of health care systems of countries like Germany, China, Russia, Spain, Cuba, Malaysia and Sri Lanka who seem to be doing better than countries like US and India. Her anxiety over miserable condition of health system in India reverberates with an earnestness which is sadly missing from the present national discourse. Though COVID did bring some attention to the terrifying reality of our incapacity to tackle pandemic like situations, it still hasn’t transformed into any visible effective change.
The complete review appears here:
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