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Saturday Diary: Is there an Indian in the house?
Saturday, May 01, 1999 By Anita Srikameswaran
So I'm sitting at my desk, trying to keep a low profile, when my editor hands me a study paper from a recent issue of the British Medical Journal.
Anita Srikameswaran (anitas@post-gazette.com) is a Post-Gazette staff writer covering medicine and health.
My inner 2-year-old's reaction to anything he hands me is "No! No! No!"
But I've only screamed out loud a few times, despite what he may tell you.
Anyway, the study turns out to be an analysis of South Asian general practitioners working in the United Kingdom's National Health Service. Why does my editor think I'd be interested?
True confession: I was a South Asian general practitioner.
I still am South Asian -- Indian, to be specific -- but stopped doctoring more than a year ago in order to become a medical writer. I do, occasionally, provide some emergency medical advice to colleagues in the newsroom, such as how to spell the word hemorrhage.
Back to the study. According to the authors, 16.5 percent of full-time NHS general practitioners as of 1992 had received their qualifications at medical schools in Bangladesh, India, Pakistan or Sri Lanka. They'd emigrated to the U.K. in the 1960s and '70s.
What worries the researchers is that two-thirds of these doctors will have retired by 2007. The requirements to obtain a medical license have changed with time, so it is unlikely that foreign-trained physicians can emigrate to the U.K. to fill the gap.
"In some health [districts]," the researchers wrote, "over half the general practitioners qualified in South Asia, meaning replacement of such doctors will be a major issue that will remain beyond the next decade."
You'd never know from the entertainment industry that Indian physicians play a significant role in delivering health care in this society.
It has long been a pet peeve of mine that the extremely popular television show, "ER," doesn't have any portrayals of Indian docs. I mean, come on. This is supposed to be reality. This is supposed to be Chicago.
Like many North American cities, Chicago has a thriving and substantial population of Indians. Its Devon Street is long and lined with bustling tandoori eateries and sari boutiques. And for the last several years at the University of Chicago's medical school, about 20 percent of the student body has been Asian-American. (That includes South Asians, Chinese, Koreans, and so on. At least we're all not lumped into the infamous "Other" category.)
The Invisible Indian Syndrome doesn't even stop with this planet.
You hardly ever see one on the bridge of the Starship Enterprise. Sure, there was that time Vijay Amritraj played a captain of another ship for a cameo in "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." And that bald woman in the first motion picture was Indian, but I think she played an alien.
How do you reconcile the fact that a country of nearly a billion people -- including hordes of engineers, physicists and, of course, doctors -- couldn't put more than one person in the Federation? Maybe 25th-century Indians are driving interstellar cabs.
To be fair, maybe the problem is not a lack of parts, but a lack of Indian actors to play them. At least, in North America. All the Indian kids who were born here seem to be going to medical school.
I was glued to the TV one Saturday watching "Xena: The Warrior Princess." I offer this excuse: My 5-year-old niece likes it and I wanted to have something to talk about with her. Buy that? Anyway, I had not seen a new episode in months.
The show normally is set in ancient Greece and it bends mythology to entertain modern audiences. Over the course of the series, viewers saw Xena's sidekick, Gabrielle, undergo a metamorphosis from a chubby, awkward village girl into a confident, competent young woman with washboard abs who efficiently whacked attackers with a big stick.
But something happened during episodes I missed because she had developed a new incarnation.
Wide-eyed, I took in the bindi on her forehead (what non-Indians often call a dot), the filmy scarf draped around her shoulders and over her head, and the tattoo-like henna decorations called mehndi that marked her upper chest and still fab abs. She wore a short skirt and a midriff-baring, tight-fitting blouse. Gabrielle had blended Indian and Greek fashion into a display even Madonna could love.
Xena and Gabrielle were adventuring in a pretend India. With Hanuman, the monkey god, and the blue-skinned god Krishna, of Indian mythology. They talked of nonviolence and different paths to enlightenment and Xena battled a six-armed demon king.
Holy cow!
The neatest part for me, though, was that the requisite villagers-that-need-saving were all played by Indians.
India has the largest film industry outside of California. That's why Bombay's nickname is "Bollywood." It seems to me that at least a few of these actors should pull a Jackie Chan and punch into the United States entertainment megacorporation.
Maybe India should train even more actors, expecting that some percent of them will take those skills to places like Hollywood where, it seems, they are desperately needed to show the diversity that has long been present in many parts of the globe.
Besides, if those British researchers are right, the medicine thing is no longer a viable route out of the homeland. Perhaps it's time for foreign physicians to stop treating injured legs and rather, go out there and break some.
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