Reflections

This is an intensely personal experience of Kolkata as she was 35 years ago. Written by Dr Susmita Dutta, Professor of Anesthesiology who has lived in Kolkata for many years and now lives far away. How do I begin to tell the story of my love hate relationship with Kolkata, When I say I love this city, yes I do so from far, yet when I am there, I cannot but think of the day I would be leaving. It was not always like this. I arrived one fine morning after having completed my studies in medicine at the beckoning of my parents who had fixed up my marriage. My earlier relationship with this city was that of several short term visits to my grandparents’ house in Jadavpur. My grandparents had migrated from East Bengal, I think in the early fifties, and my first memory of Kolkata is the family bonhomie which surrounded us during our visits. My father always said that the medical colleges of Kolkata, especially Medical College was one of the premier institutions in the country and whenever ...

The Chamang Falls Last Sunday, we drove out to the Chamang waterfall in Pahang. It is easy to reach from KL. Just take the Gombak exit to enter the Karak Highway, go pass the exits to Genting and Berjaya Hills and exit at the Bentong exit. Just after you exit the Bentong town there is a left hand turn off to Chamang. The distance is about 10 km, from the turn off, the road is narrow, so you have to drive slowly, but that is good, because the road enters a green forest which steadily grows more dense until you reach Chamang. The waterfall has been much written about and sometimes can be dangerous as many incautious people have lost their lives here. This time as we drove down the road, I noticed a lot of Indian men, women and youngsters: a large proportion seemed to be Sikhs. They were all walking to the falls, clad in identical blue T shirts, they were sweaty, some even seemed a little grumpy, but for the most part they seemed to be having a great time. We reached Chamang and set...

Dr Werner Forssmann Werner Forssman was born in Berlin in 1904. He studied in school and in University at Berlin and remained there throughout the First World War during which he lost his father. Post World war Germany was a horrific place, the country was ravaged by the demands of the victorious Allies. He was lucky to be funded by one of his uncles who made it possible for him to study medicine in the University of Berlin. But qualifying as a doctor was the least of his worries: getting a job was very difficult in the Germany of those days. He initially had hoped to do Internal medicine, but this involved long stints at unpaid assistantships, which he could not afford. He thus turned to a surgical trainee post at the Auguste Viktoria Red Cross hospital at Eberwalde, a provincial town 45 miles from Berlin. It was here that he first proposed what would become the basis of right heart catheterization. He suggested that it would be possible to send a catheter from the veins of the ar...

Harry Leslie Lee According to his profile in the Guardian newspaper website , "Harry Leslie Smith is a survivor of the Great Depression, a second world war RAF veteran and an activist for the poor and for the preservation of social democracy. He has authored numerous books about Britain during the great depression, the second world war, and postwar austerity" his latest book is Harry's Last Stand. In an extract which was published in the Guardian a few days ago, he describes how major illness used to end in poor families in the pre NHS days. It sounded eerily similar to many stories that I have heard during my wanderings in rural India. I think it is a powerful argument in favour of setting up a good quality public health services system and against the present system in India where all governments are insidiously at work to undermine the government ( and basically free) health system and passing the buck to the private ( and insanely expensive, at least in the Indian ...