E-Paper
A dream gone sour
A COUPLE of years back Linda Amen, 57, came from the United States to settle down in India. She felt she?d been reincarnated to live in India, and among her people. Like most foreigners, she thought India ?was a land of peace and spirituality but I found nothing like that here.?
A COUPLE of years back Linda Amen, 57, came from the United States to settle down in India. She felt she’d been reincarnated to live in India, and among her people. Like most foreigners, she thought India “was a land of peace and spirituality but I found nothing like that here.”
Each time her love for the country was breached either by deception or by theft. She lost everything, courtesy burglars. Describing her experience in India, Linda says that this India was totally different from what she had been reading about since childhood.
To add to her woes, she had a nightmarish experience at the Ursula Horsman Memorial Hospital, here in the city. This time her faith was shaken by the stereotypical apathy at the hospital.
She landed in Kanpur on Independence Day, quite by chance, when she boarded the wrong train to New Delhi from Jammu. On reaching here, she suffered severe a stomach ache and somehow reached Ursula Horsman Memorial Hospital. There was no one around.
“I kept braving the unbearable pain, kept looking for doctors and nurses but no was available. People around told me all had gone to attend I-Day celebrations,” she recalls. Finally, when a doctor did reach her after hours of waiting, he did the unthinkable. He told Linda that her sufferings would do no harm to her, saying, “Death is a part of life”.
Though refusing to make any complaint against hospital staff, Linda said, “I had never expected such a response from a doctor”. Meanwhile, this is not the end of her ordeal, as the attending staff demands ‘suvidha shulk’, a concept, which she is completely alien to.
A good photographer, Linda had pinned her observations of life and India in a book named, ‘Eclecticism’. The book starts with the line, “Never get disappointed when your children disappoint you.”
It seems hard to digest but the hard times that Linda had to go in the ‘land of her dreams’ could not break her bond with India. She claims that she still loves India for its religious and cultural diversity.
