She was fashionable and rich. She wore thing and danced at latest clubs and had dreams of famous paediatrician going to London to become a famous paediatrician.
But her destiny was elsewhere in the dusty little village of Kapashera, This is a compelling and honest memoir of a young doctor who had to give up her dreams to face the challenges of a rural practice. She goes on to change the lives of her patients by treating not only their physical diseases but solving their psychological, marital, and adolescent issues In four decades of her practice, the author watched as India woke up to globalisation, and the new farmland wealth that exposed the highs and lows of the human behaviour. There are horrific stories of the villagers' superstitious beliefs and blind faith in the village quacks and voodoo doctors, with disastrous consequences. Yet there is joy, celebration, and hope amidst despair. Each story is part of a thirty-eight-year unhurried journey that holds you spellbound as you turn the pages.
A graduate from Lady Hardinge Medical College, Dr Balesh Jindal has practised medicine for the last thirty-eight years. She has been a pioneer in providing a one-stop health facility at low cost and single-handedly changing the mortality rates for the children in Kapashera. Her work in treating Tuberculosis and HIV is well documented. She has been the recipient of the Award for Compassion by Stanford University's Centre of Compassion. BBC has also featured her work The Most Compassionate Day in the World. In addition to her outstanding achievements as a Doctor, Jindal is also an accomplished artist, poet and badminton player.
I HAVE TO thank my father for his vision and for setting me on this truly incredible journey of a lifetime. I thank my mother for her silent support behind the curtains. I learnt my life lessons from her silences.
I am grateful to Rattan, my husband, for always having my back and for his endless guidance as I floundered along learning the finer nuances of being a doctor.
I need to thank Rahul and Mehul for their constant encouragement and their gift of a beautiful writing table where I spent the entire year of the first Covid wave writing and rewriting this book. If it were not for them this book would still be on my bucket list waiting.
I thank all my patients who stepped inside my clinic to enrich me and to let me learn from them. I am grateful to them for being a part of my journey for without them there would have been no journey. I am truly overwhelmed by the trust and the affection that they showered on me.
THE RELUCTANT DOCTOR takes the reader on a forty-year biographical journey that is honest and vulnerable-vulnerable because all emotions have been laid bear with no safety nets. These are stories of hope, desolation, decadence and tragedy. Yet, they inspire because even when there was no hope in sight, I continued trudging along and doing what I thought had to be done. Doing so left me with so many questions that confounded me.
How much compassion is good enough? I used to wonder. If one's own child has a fever, isn't it best for a doctor to steer clear of her patients and tend to her own child?
Is it right for a doctor to get so involved with her patients that she forgets her child's bad grades, tantrums and school functions?
Is it appropriate for a doctor to feel so empathetic towards her patients that she has no time to empathise with her own family?
What is too little and too much caring?
When does empathy become pathological?
SEVERAL YEARS AGO, much before I got to know Balesh Jindal-doctor, painter and now writer-I lived in Gurgaon for a while, between postings. Virtually every day on my way to and from work, I'd drive past a corner building bang on a busy crossroads, bearing the name 'Dr Jindal's Clinic'. As I waited for the lights to change, I would idly visualise the physician inside as a ponderous, bespectacled gentleman dispensing, with rough kindness, advice, admonishment, prescriptions and strips of specimen medicines amongst hordes of ardent patients.
You can imagine my surprise, hence, when I met Balesh for the first time in her alternative avatar of renowned artist and learnt that she was the Dr Jindal presiding over the clinic that had become, for a time, such a quintessential part of my travel landscape! Warmly feminine, elegant, soft-spoken and dreamy- eyed, she couldn't have been more different from the middle- aged doctor with salt-and-pepper hair that I'd conjured in my mind.
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