Rajmal's legacy...and reasons to be cheerful

On almost exactly this day ten years ago, my Indian mentor and good friend Rajmal Jain died at his rural hospital in Rajasthan.

He passed away as he lived – with the minimum of dramatics, in the single bed in his modest room at the Shree Bhairav Eye Hospital, with the chatter of patients down the corridor likely to have been the last thing that he heard.

My family visited to mark this anniversary. On my part, with mixed emotions, fearful that after 10 years without his influence the ethos of the hospital might have altered. So much changes so quickly in India. And not always for the good.

What I found was a joy. And such an inducement to cheer in the New Year with huge optimism. So I am fighting jet-lag to sneak in this blog before the midnight hour.

For Second Sight, it all began in rural Rajasthan. On a July day in the year 2000, Rajmal Jain uttered these memorable words to me : ‘people come offering money, offering equipment, but we all need eye surgeons.’
I had no money, no equipment, but I had eye surgeons. By Christmas Day 2000 my friend Mani from Nottingham was at the Bhairav Eye Hospital. His first patient was a blind shepherd. No faffing about on anyone’s part. That was the Rajmal way. That was and is our way.

When we decided to focus our work in Bihar, Rajmal urged us on.
“They are needing you more” he commented. I last saw him in 2011.

So why was I so cheered by our recent visit to the Shree Bhairav Eye hospital in Rajasthan?

Well, I had just spent five weeks in Bihar with a quick detour into Odisha. I had a glorious time with the hospitals associated with us. (More in future blogs). However, in some areas of Bihar, the obsession with building bigger and bigger hospitals seems to have got worse. Private hospitals are popping up everywhere. In addition wealthy NGOs are in fierce competition with each other to construct towering trophy hospitals. Any charitable eye hospital team agreeing to such support is put under pressure  to deliver ‘results’. In other words numbers. The humanity of the work gets lost. To quote the telling words of American ophthalmologist David Apple:

‘One blind person = a tragedy
 Two blind persons = a disaster
 One million blind persons = a statistic.’

This was never going to be the case at the Bhairav Eye hospital in Rajasthan. During his lifetime, Rajmal Jain had been sought out by almost every large international sight charity. And his hospital was a recipient of their funding. However, with time, he distanced himself from them. No patient was ever going to become a mere statistic.

Today, even without the awesome influence of Rajmal Jain, the hospital is  managing to retain its ethics and ethos. It remains a happy hospital in which patients are definitely the most important people. Apart from some tasteful reflooring, upgrading of toilets and washrooms and a new ward, it is the sprawling one storey hospital that Rajmal himself designed and knocked down a mountain to build. It is busy every day of the week.

Many of the original staff are still there. Champalal, hospital driver and Rajmal’s right hand man, still smoking bidis and recounting how often he saw leopards en route, bemused by the fact that nowadays tourists pay a lot of money to visit special leopard reserves; electrician Prabhu who can fix anything; ophthalmic assistant Sualal, still beaming after a village screening camp at which he had identified many patients requiring surgery. Many others whose names I have forgotten but whose faces I recognized. All still loving the work.

And eye surgeon Dr Gulam Ali now working at his own clinic in the city of Jodhpur. He had worked at Rajmal’s hospital for 12 years. We reminisced about a research paper he had co-written with Second Sight ophthalmologist Raman Malhotra. It was about the excellent post-operative vision they had managed to achieve at the hospital with their 5 minute small incision cataract surgery. The poster was accepted by the British Royal College of Ophthalmologists. It was the first paper ever accepted from a rural hospital in Rajasthan. And that was back in the year 2002! Wow, we were ahead of the times and didn’t even realise it, Gulam and I agreed.

So much of our freedom to do what we do best was down to Rajmal Jain.
He was easily the most principled, honest, informed, undeceived and successful humanitarian that I have yet met in India. He was also very funny and never took himself too seriously. Obviously with such an endearing combination of character traits he made it into both my books – A Runaway Goat and Outgrowing the Big. Appropriately, on the tenth anniversary of his death, the books are now on sale in Rajasthan, at the Rajat Book Corner in Jaipur.
Sadly, Rajmal’s own copy of the Goat ran away in a sense. He was reading it in his Third Class sleeper compartment on the train to Mumbai and fell asleep with it on his chest. It was purloined by a light- fingered thief. Rajmal’s comment: ‘must be good book for thief to be so daring.’
Quintessentially Rajmal.

Happy New Year to all!

Lucy Mathen