Doctor ki kahani

I have been thinking of the Pankaj Kapoor-starrer `Ek Doctor ki Maut’ since last evening. The film, loosely based on a true story, was about a Calcutta-based brilliant but frustrated scientist (Kapoor) who is sidelined at work and later posted to some remote village to prevent him from continuing his research work on a vaccine, thanks to ego tussles and bureaucracy typical of government departments.
In one particular scene of the film when Kapoor is visited by his wife (Shabana Azmi) in the village where he is posted, he brilliantly portrays the angst of genius unable to do what he is best at since the facilities in the village were poor for any kind of research work.
I thought of the film while speaking to various state government officials and a famous doctor while working on a report on a rare case of conjoined twins who have been brought to a government hospital in Hyderbad from Guntur for treatment.
The two-and-a-half-year-old twins, who were abandoned by their parents soon after birth, were being treated at the government hospital in Guntur and were even fortunate to have a world-famous doctor, Dr Y Nayudamma, treating them. The doctor, who has performed similar surgeries on three cases of conjoined twins over the last 15 years, retired from the hospital last year. I wondered why neither the state health department nor the hospital superiors extended his tenure knowing fully well that he was perhaps the only hope the twins had.
During his tenure, he had already performed a preliminary surgery on the twins and was planning to undertake another surgery after the two conjoined babies had put on weight, he told me. But, that was not to be. Even as he was consulting other doctors about the twins, the hospital decided to move the babies out of Guntur as the hospital there did not have the infrastructure to take up the surgery.
The doctor is now watching from the sidelines even as fresh investigations are being conducted on a case that he knows far too well. I wondered whether he was feeling as sidelined and frustrated as Kapoor had felt in the film. The doctor did not say anything like that to me except that "58 is n o age to retire".
Meanwhile, the government hospital in Hyderabad is preparing to undertake such a surgery for the first time.