One day long back in my teens, I had a chance to go to hospital to visit one of my relatives. He could not afford a private hospital, so he was in a government hospital in Delhi. Most of the government hospitals have bad reputation for carelessness and negligence. He was in the general ward, and the ward was packed like any thing, there were about two to three patients in each bed. Some of the patients were crying very loudly with pain, and there was no doctor to attend to them for a long time. Only a nurse who looked more like a wild beast than a human being would come after some time, scold the patients badly and would leave.
This sight of extremely woeful plight of human beings was just unbearable. I was in a state of great shock, because for the first time in my life I had seen the human beings suffering so much in God’s world. In my school books I had read stories with happy endings, and had also watched some movies in which I saw human miseries going away in the end. But here, as I was in a state of great mental turmoil, I thought for a moment what I read in school books and watched in movies was all false. The real picture of today’s human being is what I see now.
In the far corner of the ward on the edge of a bed was sitting a scared middle aged male patient withdrawn into him, because another patient in his bed who was struggling between life and death had left this cruel world for ever, a little while ago. And the relatives of the deceased had further increased the helplessness and the agony of the fellow patient by crying loudly as an expression of grief over the loss of their dear one.
Having sensed the seriousness of the situation, I moved towards the bed and tried to console the mourning people. As I kept my hand on the shoulder of the live patient in the bed, he took a long sigh of relief that sounded the indication of the sense that he was still alive. Gradually, I engaged that man in conversation with me, and in just little time I could see that the fear of death had almost vanished from his face. That was the moment when I fist time realized that a few words of love and care from you can really bring a great change in someone’s life.
And from that day onwards I keep trying to do something in my little way for the unwanted, uncared for and underprivileged children and elderly people.
Featured in the EzineArticles.com Directory
