Author's note

Authors note:

With a prompt like 'Outside my Window' for this #WordsMatter bloghop, I actually had a whole article prepared in my mind, showcasing the early effects of the rains in Kerala, keeping in mind the devastating floods that hit us last year around this time.

I ditched that post.

You see, I barely look out the window of my house. Most of my awake life is spent inside a hospital doing surgeries. And those glass panels on the operation theater doors... those are the windows I am most familiar with. But you aren't.




What you see in this image is not a painting but real life. It is a random glimpse into what I have seen everyday of my life in different cities and states of India since over a decade. It is not just a random operation. It is so much more.

1. It is a young woman who has just become a mother without suffering any pain during birth.
2. It is a new baby girl who has just moments ago come out and taken the first ever breath of her life. Her first cry. Her first kiss from her mother who was happy to have a daughter in the family now.
3. It is an operation theater with enough facilities to ensure that the mother being operated upon is monitored and safe every second of the surgery, a privilege millions of women in India cannot access even today.
4. It is an operation theater filled with women and women alone, from the surgeon to her assistant and anaesthesiologist, something that would have been considered ridiculous less than a century ago. 

But it isn't about a century ago. In India even today, across so many sections and strata of society, each of the above - to become a mother without suffering pain, to be loved for being a girl child (or even allowed to take your first breath for the heinous crime of being a girl inside a womb), to have access to quality healthcare or to perform your job without having it being dissected by a male superior - is an impossible dream.

That needs to change. That change comes by acknowledging we have a long way to go.

When I look 'inside my window' in my operation theater, I see hope in four different and significant forms. I would be happy if I knew these same hopes - a woman without pain, a girl who is loved, safe healthcare for all and women leading the way at the work place - existed, in every sense of the word, outside these hospital windows too, out there in the rest of this country.     

Surely, something is wrong if it is safer for a woman, her baby and her surgeon to be inside an operation theater than out in the streets of India.

Authors note