The modern thinking Indian

Sometimes one comes across cases where you start wondering as to whether regulations are meant to help humans or to thwart them ? What purposes are rules that only lead to the death of humans or hinder them when they are in need. An example of this is seen in what happened in Delhi on the 7th of April, 2008. For a long time, movies and television have been propagating the prospect that any accident or other such grievous case victim cannot be treated unless there is a police case. Further, normal people are also worried about the same thing; nobody wants to get involved in cases dealing with accidents, even to the extent that if you see an accident happen in front of you, most people would look the other way and not try to get involved. This gets doubled if the injury is criminal in nature, say if a person gets shot or knifed.
But is this avoidance only because of the worry of getting involved ? Or is it because we are so involved in our own selves that we would rather not get involved - how many times have you seen young kids being exploited as labour and looked the other way; or seen an accident victim lying on the road and continued on ? We continually see examples of this kind of behavior:

Harshal ran to his father's car. "I saw the bullet had gone in right under his ear into the neck and there was blood spilling all over the seat. Because the seatbelt was still fastened, he was sitting upright. A crowd had gathered there and kept looking at me while I unfastened his seatbelt and put him on the back seat. No one even offered to help and when I asked for it, they just didn't," said Harshal.

Similarly, the distraught son has claimed that the hospitals that he went to refused to admit him because of it being a medico-legal case, and that is a real shocker. Even though the hospitals involved have refused that such a thing happened, how many of us think that such a thing could have happened ?

Forty-seven-year-old Arun Gupta, a businessman who was shot in the neck, died of his injuries after battling for life for nearly three hours on Monday morning. In fact, his son, Harshal, has alleged that the first hour — considered to be the golden hour for such victims — was spent in rushing him from one hospital to another which turned him down though a prominent hospital has denied any such incident.
According to two SC judgments, no doctor or hospital can deny life-saving emergency treatment to a patient. In two landmark judgments — Parmanand Katara vs Union of India and Paschim Banga Khet Mazdoor Samiti vs State of West Bengal — the Supreme Court upheld every person's right to life.

I see this everywhere, and maybe I am as guilty of this as anyone else. Even though I recall a case where we had helped a biker who had crashed into our case, one cannot be really sure about the response when we are confronted with a person who is severely injured or has just been shot. In addition to the human nature that is concerned with helping others, there is now a contrary nature that deals with avoiding any sort of trouble.

Labels: Medical, Morality, Responsibility