By Eisha Sarkar
Posted on the Pax Populi blog on 25 April 2916
This April, I had the privilege to meet
Tinku Gupta, my fellow Pax Populi tutor at her home in Kolkata,
India. While videoconferencing is great, meeting people in person
allows you to discover so much more about the person and even
yourself.
Sitting at the dining table of Tinku's
seventh-floor apartment which offers a panoramic view of the city, we
discussed cultures, our marriages, education, home interiors,
cooking, Mughal history, Kolkata and Afghanistan. “My husband is
fed up with Afghanistan,” she said and burst out laughing. For the
last five years, Tinku, who runs a travel agency, has been
facilitating medical treatments and consultation in India for
Afghans. “It started with a Rotary project on thalassemia,” she
said. Her agency had helped an Afghan child get blood transfusions
and treatment in Kolkata. Since then, she has been swamped with
emails, messages and pictures of people in Afghanistan who are
looking to get treated for various ailments in India. “There, the
medical services are almost non-existent and many Afghans cannot
afford treatment in Western countries. Indian doctors are very
competent and because of the cultural similarities, Afghans prefer to
be treated here,” she explained.
Tinku's business partners in Kabul
screen patients who apply to them for transplants, transfusions,
amputations, knee replacements and cataract surgeries. They send her
the medical histories of patients, which are often in Dari or Pashto
and need to be translated into English. “When I go to the shop to
get a photocopy, they think it is Urdu and ask me if it has come from
Pakistan. Then they see 'Kabul' written on the envelopes and
curiously ask, 'Afghanistan?' I enjoy their reactions,” she
chuckled.
I watched Tinku closely as she giggled
through the two-hour conversation. She had worked very hard to make
this business model work and while she did feel let down a few times,
she asserted, “Afghans are wonderful people to work with.” I
agreed. We talked about Pax Populi and her student, Jamal. Tinku
shared a memory from one of their tutoring sessions: “I once asked
him what he wants to do in the future. Jamal told me he wishes to go
to the US and study. I asked him, 'Will you come back to Afghanistan
after your studies?' He said, 'Of course! I want to do something for
my country.' I loved it. The youngsters in Afghanistan are very keen
to see their country develop. It's a very positive thing.”
When I had contacted Tinku to ask her
if she would meet me over a coffee, I had intended it to be a
discussion about Pax Populi, peace-building and education. I walked
away from this meeting with a sense of wonder and a feeling of
gratitude that I had met a woman of tremendous courage and strength,
who in spite of claiming to be “not ambitious,” had challenged the
set norms for a married Indian woman and found a business opportunity
where few had dared to go.
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