Sculpting Life

One

The crowded bar was noisy.

On the far corner, where the sparse light of the hall faded even further, she sat crosslegged on the table, her listeners sitting around the table, trying to give her as much attention as their wavering foci would allow them to. But she went on talking, disinterested in the loyalty of the listeners, her mind at times wandering to the tea estates of Assam where the patriarch who owned vast expanses of them, her father, Dhirendra Roy Chaudhary, waited in vain for her return.

The girl was one of a kind. She was born in a highland mansion in the Northeast Indian state of Assam where tea plants carpeted the slopes of the undulating land and, occasionally woke up from their slumber to murmur to the silvery white clouds descended from heaven for a friendly chat. She forsook her affluent life in the mountains for the Friday races of Calcutta, abandoned her horses for the skies British Airways flew through, lost the fatter purse the European airline offered for a wider horizon and sparser returns Air India promised her, gave up the carefree abandon of the airlines job for the job as full time wife to Bhim, vacated the royal palaces of Jaipur and Tripura for the streets of Delhi. Winning a beauty pageant, scrubbing floors at the destitute homes of Mother Teresa, gambling a fortune at Calcutta racecourse, begging all and sundry for money to run Ila Trust, the NGO she founded, all came easy to her. She shared her birthday with Amitabh Bachchan and shared her whiskey with Khushwant Singh. At the race course, she wore a waist coat and a pair of trousers, sported a derby hat and wielded a cane but the masculine make over never succeeded in camouflaging her stunning beauty. At Missionaries of Charity, she offloaded all the money she won at the previous Friday races and merrily spent the day with the homeless. During a time when rich ladies travelled in chauffeur driven cars, she drove a Maruti Gypsy only to sell it off to fund the construction of a hospice for the Aids and TB patients in Guwahati.

Her friendship with Satyajit Ray made her do a cameo in Seemabaddha. David Bailey and Anthony Snowdon trained their lenses on her many a times. Elton John opened his purse to fund some of her charitable projects. At the end of the frenzied journey, she reached the streets of New Delhi and started running an ambulance and mobile clinic network, dispensing medical service, free of cost, to the slum dwellers of the capital city. While her husband, Bhim, took multiple trips a day down the streets of Khan Market area in New Delhi feeding stray cats, she scurried around gathering money to foster her free medical service. These days, the automobile hosted clinics travel around the city and the financially compromised inhabitants of the city wait for their arrival, with disease ravaged bodies but minds lit up by hope.

Reeta Devi Varma, nee Reeta Roy, one of the My Fair Ladies of Khushwant Singh, remains a quintessential maverick, though mellowed down a bit by the affection showered on her by the thousands of poor people who have experienced the whiff of her universal love.

Two

A car accident paralyzed half his body, a heart which functioned at 17 percent made him go for a pacemaker, an attack of cancer butchered his larynx forcing him to use a voice box. But all those setbacks did not stop Sharad Kumar Dixit, or Sharad Kumar Dicksheet as he later came to be known, from becoming the quickest plastic surgeon the world has seen, the one who would complete a cleft lip correction, with his left hand, in under 20 minutes, while his right hand hung wasted, refusing to listen to his biddings.

On November 14th, 2011, when the children of India slept tired after celebrating the Indian version of Children's Day, six days prior to the day United Nations prescribed for the observance, the man who brought back smiles on many of them was bidding farewell to the world which picked him for its choicest atrocities. A fatigued Sharad Kumar breathed his laborious last, lying on a ragged bed in a run down Ocean Parkway apartment in Brooklyn; the man the ''World of Children'' organization called an unsung hero had had enough of this unjust world. His long hair, which looked like a cheap wig bought from the corner store, spread in disarray; he had long since stopped visiting the barber.

The exhausting journey started in the wretched house of a local post master in a small hamlet in Maharashtra, in 1930, the year the Indian National Congress declared India as an independent state. That was the start of an extraordinary journey which carried the boy through the science classes of Nizam College, the ophthalmology lecture halls of Nagpur Medical College and the plastic surgery rooms of Fairbanks Hospital, Mount Sinai Hospital and the New York Methodist Hospital. Life was looking up and rosy with his energies divided between his professional duties in the US and his humanitarian efforts in India, launched under the banner, "The India Project" in 1968, till a 1978 Alaska tour intervened in the scheme of things in the form of a car accident to spoil the plans. The accident left Sharad with his body paralyzed on the right side and would later play havoc with his married life. Four years later, before he could get used to the limitations imposed by the misfortune, he was diagnosed with cancer of larynx which took away his voice, he spoke for the rest of his life with the aid of a voice box. Still he plodded on, working intensively for six months in North America and taking a winter hiatus to move to India where he repaired cleft lips, ptoses and squints, free of charge, associating with several NGOs and local hospitals. The effort seemed to take its toll on the healer, he was having difficulty, at times, in breathing and experienced constant palpitations. The diagnosis came a decade later, his heart was functioning only seventeen percent. A cardiac surgery followed and a pacemaker was installed.

Sharad Kumar carried on his selfless service for another seventeen years and the exhausting labour ended on a Childrens Day, an apt day for a children's doctor to call it a day.

Three

Endless miseries, ravaging terrors, cultural ruins, inequalities in wealth, health and emotions all would have made the world a lesser place to live in but for some of these people who sculpted their lives, ever so arduously, like a weaver bird builds its nest, fiber by fiber, twig by little twig. Mindless of the struggles, they ignore the hardships, neglect the tyrannies and push forward. Like Phoolbasan Bai Yadav, born in a poor family in Chhattisgarh, with only primary level education, who braved her husband's torture to set up "Maan Bamleshwari Janhit Kare Samiti", a poor people's movement, which grew over the years into a mass movement holding together 12,000 self groups and 200,000 members. Like Reema Nanavati, an IAS officer born amidst riches, who abandoned the comforts and social status of the hallowed bureaucracy to venture into the dusty villages of Gujarat and worked with the famished women of "Self Employed Women's Association of India" (SEWA) of Ela Bhatt, shared food with them, worked for the rehabilitation of the victims of two earthquakes in Gujarat in 2001 and 2002, gathered 40,000 families, convinced them to produce goods which she sold, for them, in upscale towns, went to Bhutan, Afghanistan and Sri Lanka to bring comfort to the victims of civil war in those desolate lands.

Reeta, Dicksheet, Phoolbasan and Reema were all honoured by the Government of India, at one time or another, with the civilian honour of  Padma Shri. That was the least a nation could do.