No race in the world can beat us at evading personal
responsibility.
Floundering businesses, failed relationships, rocky
domesticity, social disasters, unfortunate accidents, professional
misadventures, follies of the heart and tongue….’kismet’ is always on hand to
shoulder the blame. There is one issue though; missing in the list and more
often than not, credited to people around instead of fate, for a change.
Have you noticed how ailing Indians seem powerless over
their ailments? Of course there is old age, a genuine physiological malfunction
and God forbid, even accidents but there is a remarkable disconnect between the
sick and the management of their sickness. It is as though, their diseases have
to do with everyone else around them other than themselves. Rather than take
personal charge of their physical malaise, they will have the entire clan
aligned alongside, one way or the other, fretting, fuming and fulminating in
their morbid miasma.
In a pan-Indian, national trend, every Indian adult’s health
and fitness is someone else’s designated portfolio. A wife is completely
answerable for her husband’s physical wellbeing. The daughter-in-law better
account for her parents’-in-law state of health. Every soul under the same roof
will have the family senior’s health needs marked well within their purview.
Indian sons are known to chart their destinies around their mother’s aching
joints and daughters have spent endless hours caring for fathers who stubbornly
refuse to follow the doctor’s orders.
It is understood and presumed that the diabetic will not
himself watch his sugar intake. The asthmatic cannot be expected to watch her
tolerance level for the out of doors. Who can blame the rheumatoid for not
regularly exercising their joints? Instead, the immediate brood around have to
take the blame and carry the guilt for actions or inactions of the suffering.
As a matter of fact, in many families, the disease becomes a lifelong presence,
cultivated and stoked and at times, even used to manipulate family dynamics.
We will be a healthier, happier and more hopeful nation if
we worked on the premise that one’s health is primarily, one’s own personal
responsibility. If you have a urinary tract infection, the onus is on you to
drink more water, not on your family to keep pushing aqua at you. If you are
diabetic, please watch your sugar intake and don’t keep others on tenterhooks
over having served a sugary concoction at dinner. If you are obese, stop
blaming the wife for not serving enough salad as appetizer so you could stuff
your face a shade less with the deadly stuff that you do, as a matter of
routine.
Not for a moment am I recommending that we abdicate care of
the indisposed at home. But they certainly need to drop the martyr mantle and
actively start sharing the major portion of the load. The greatest love we can
show our families is to take charge of our own pneumonias, bronchial issues,
nasal allergies and fungal growths.
It is time to take the necessary precautions,
exercise the required self-discipline and follow the prescribed medical schedules
to the T. The great Indian family is always on hand for terrible and terminal
sicknesses but how about shouldering some genuine, self-directed and concrete
responsibility for getting well! How about emerging from the convenient,
comfortable, cosy couch of helplessness with a new resolve to get whole, healthy
and healed?
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