Dr. Sharan Patil's Hope, Faith And Love
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Image: Mallikarjun Katkol for Forbes India
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Dr. Sharan Patil
Profile: Founder, Sparsh Hospital
He says:
• I have always preferred honesty over efficiency, candour over subordination and the opinionated over submissive
individuals.
• We must be transparent and not hesitate to ask for help. You need to have expertise and professional inputs in the areas of specialisation and that includes finance if you want to build an enterprise.
Lakshmi is the goddess of wealth. Her arrival is not associated with fear and hopelessness: Unless, of course, her name is Lakshmi Tatma. She was born with eight limbs to parents in Araria, a remote Bihar village. The villagers revered her as the incarnation of the Goddess but the parents realised there was something seriously wrong.
They took her to one of the best state-run hospitals in Delhi. The hospital wouldn’t advise a life-threatening procedure to remove the parasitical twin, without a head, growing in Lakshmi’s body.
Even as the parents were coming to terms with this, they were hounded by unscrupulous elements who wanted to buy the child and sell her as a curiosity. They panicked and fled back to their village.
When word reached Dr. Sharan Patil in September 2007, in Bangalore, the man left his work at Sparsh Hospital, which he had started a few years ago, and travelled to see Lakshmi. It was a near impossible mission to deal with the villagers who wanted her the way she was, parents who were scared, and a procedure that could only potentially, not certainly, save the baby.
Patil managed to persuade the parents to get Lakshmi to Bangalore. The rest is history. A team of doctors surgically removed the parasitical twin through a 24-hour procedure. National Geographic Channel broadcast the story in a two-part film that would make people across the world take note of India’s medical competence, and want to see Patil.
That is how I am here today. To get a sense of what makes him do what he does, I must enter his world. After an hour of conversation in his office, I don the surgical gown and we get into the operation theatre. Patil has three procedures today and I must get him in-between them. The first procedure is a knee replacement.
For the next couple of hours, he cuts open the man’s knees, tries out fitment for artificial knee caps and then fixes special steel caps that will make the patient get back his life. After the procedure, I ask Patil, how soon can the man walk again? “Tomorrow, we will make him walk a few steps,” he answers.
Surgery over, we return to the beginning, so to speak: Sharan Patil’s move back to India from Liverpool, Britain, where he trained to perform miracles.
“I never thought of staying back in the West. I was fairly clear; I needed to acquire knowledge, and whatever else is good to take it back home. Coming back home meant bringing back a lot of new ideas, implementing them in an environment where the need is huge and the emotional connect is instant.”
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“Talk to us about the seeds of entrepreneurship. What were the drivers?” I ask.
“Coming from a family of professionals, I never realised I had it in me to be an entrepreneur. My wife Meena, who comes from a family of businessmen, has been a great support for me in my weak moments in this journey. When I came back to India, the single goal was to work in a state-of-the-art set up, where along with other professionals I could put to use all that I had learnt.
“I joined the Manipal Hospital and built a fairly lucrative practice quite quickly. However, restlessness started creeping in: My service was limited to those who could afford it and I was restricted in a department of five consultants.
“These circumstances were limiting the phenomenal possibilities of expanding the science of my specialty in tune with what was happening in the rest of the world. I also felt disconnected with a large section of our society which could not afford the medical practice I was involved in.
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