A Doctor's Heart Sutra

We all gasped and held our breath,praying and pleading, calling those we knew, with pounding hearts while watching the live streams of mobs attacking the peaceful protesters in Galle face Sri Lanka yesterday the 9th of May 2022.  When the mobs who came to support the Prime minister yelling out slogans asking him to stay in power, started attacking the peaceful protesters, the workers from workplaces around the area came to the Galle face grounds to protect their fellow protesters. It was breathtaking to see how health workers ran towards the protesting grounds from the National hospital Sri Lanka, which was a few kilometers away. The health workers dressed in scrubs, whites, manual workers in their jumpsuits, and office workers, lawyers in their attire filled the space and chased the mobs away. Sri Lanka has always been a nation with gratitude and hospitality. When the war ended, they treated the leading politicians with so much gratitude that some even worshiped them. ...

Daily news article by Prof. Sunanda Mahendra In a war-torn society, nothing looks bright. Humans are driven to poverty and grave need, inclusive of medical care. But with changes in a post war situation, certain social factors are lightened up. Medical care too is registered to reach a certain degree of restoration. With a strange vein of luck, I came across a collection of human notes. It is a collection recorded by a young medical doctor sent to serve in a government hospital in north. As was recorded in her blog, these notes are denoted by a broad titled ‘The Other One’ or the ‘The Other End’, and titled in English as ‘a doctor’s heart sutra’. The notes from the blog have come down now as a book packed with human interest stories, written by Dr Bodhini Samaratunga (Thatcher Publishers 2014). In the first episode you come across how this doctor is posted to a particular hospital without Tamil language skills. But as the events unveil, the reader feels that the narrator has the inner ...