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Healer Dr Prathap
Chandra Reddy and the Transformation of India
It begins with not less than 26 eulogies offered by well-known national and international personalities, including Bill Clinton, Rajendra Pachauri, Tata, Ambani, Narendra Modi as well as Kapil Sibal, all of them praising the founder of the Apollo Dr Parthap Chandra Reddy. One’s hunch is that what we are going to embark upon will not be a typical biography analysing events in a person's life to find unseen connections, revealing nuances of personality and make a case about the significance of the person's accomplishments. The hunch proves right as we get an one-sided account of Dr Reddy's virtues and how he transformed India's healthcare scenario by conjuring up "the first" private sector hospital, initially in Chennai and later on in different parts of the nation. We get to know about Dr Reddy's influential relatives and social circle, about the religious rituals and pilgrimages performed by him and his family and the godmen visited by him. One grudges the sugary tone and lopsided approach. The story is not linear, it moves in the future and in the past simultaneously, often in the same chapter. It is not difficult for the reader to follow the strand because there is so much of repetition that by the end all the facts about the chairman as well as the hospital settle into the reader's memory. For example, Chiranjeevi, Telugu superstar and father-in-law of Dr Reddy's grand-daughter is mentioned four times. One wonders whether the mission of the biographer is to etch ideas on public memory. A research on the Internet brought out papers alleging Apollo of myth making and deeply ingraining, "it-all-changed-after-Apollo" kind of notions into the psyche of contemporary India. One would rather focus on the exceptional traits of Dr Reddy such as his extraordinary organising capabilities, his accurate identification of disguised opportunities, his risk taking creativity through which he made way through bureaucratic, political and logistic challenges, his exceptional leadership qualities, and his Indian values. The biographer discusses them wrapped under swathes of rapturous appreciation and wide-eyed wonder. The feeling of joy in the gradual discovery of a person's myriad qualities and how these contributed to his exceptional achievements are buried under accolades. Whether Dr Reddy qualifies for a larger-than-life image or not should not be thrust upon readers through flowery adjectives and praise for his ancestors and clan. In the old world order, kings and feudal lords would dictate what was appropriate or not about their lives to be circulated in the public domain. In a democratic India, we need a far more balanced and evenhanded voice for a biography to be credible and, therefore, widely read.
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