Doctors and healthcare workers are doing their best to save lives, but they can’t be expected to arrange oxygen. It is govt’s job to ensure availability of life-saving medicines and smooth supply of oxygen in hospitals
The month of May stands for Manto — after all, this rebel writer was born on 11 May, many summers back, in 1912, in Punjab’s Samrala, in district Ludhiana. For the last few days I have been thinking what if Saadat Hasan Manto was alive today in these dark times! Would he have survived? Nah, it’s not just a question about the virus but the human disasters and destruction taking place all round us. Murders of the patients taking place, where even in the so called elite hospitals of the country, our fellow citizens are dying gasping for that vital oxygen flow! Yes, these oxygen related deaths can be termed murders and the murderers are the political rulers of the day.
Quite obviously, the doctors and the healthcare workers are doing their best to save human lives, but they cannot be expected to be running around here and there, filling and refilling the oxygen cylinders. It’s the job of the government and the establishment that the life -saving medicines and un- interrupted supply of oxygen is available in every hospital.
Together with that, there ought to have been enough bandobast for the checking and rechecking of electric wirings and fittings in all medical units so that the patients are not burnt to death. Not on pyres but atop hospital beds! Never before so many patients have perished in hospital fires as in these recent weeks! Traumatic! But who seems bothered! It’s a failed system that stinks, with corruption and rot spreading out. We have been left in the lurch by the political treachery that’s on and ongoing!
If Manto was alive today, his nerves couldn’t take the strain of the sheer anarchy ongoing in the name of governance. Perhaps, he would have questioned the rulers of the day for not quitting, for not stepping down, from those various posts, amidst the ongoing allegations of gross misrule.
Perhaps, Manto would have also written a detailed letter to the American President and also to the Presidents of the other foreign lands who have sent plane loads of medicines and oxygen cylinders, telling them to see to it that those life savers do not remain stuffed at our airports or ware houses but are swiftly and immediately despatched to the dying patients! In fact, during his lifetime Manto had once written to the then US President but couldn’t get to post that letter or post card as he couldn’t manage to get a postage stamp but today he wouldn’t really face any such hindrance. He would have to just about offload his thoughts or words to any of the social media enthusiasts and his worries and apprehensions would reach the White House.
