An American doctor went to India last year to care for protesting farmers. The conditions on the ground convinced him to stay – CNN

By Harmeet Kaur | CNN |

When Dr. Swaiman Singh boarded a flight to India last December, he thought he would be there for a week, tops.

Back home in New Jersey, life for the 34-year-old was “literally perfect.”

His career was taking off, with just a few months left in a three-year cardiology fellowship at Newark Beth Israel Medical Center and another prestigious opportunity lined up after that. He was a husband to a similarly ambitious wife and a father to a two-year-old daughter. He had the support of his parents and sister, who lived just a short car ride away.

Then, Singh got word that a close family friend from his ancestral village in Punjab, India — someone like a grandfather to him — had suffered a stroke at one of the sites in New Delhi where farmers had been protesting for months.

Singh figured he would get to the Indian capital of New Delhi, set up a clinic and pay some local doctors to staff it through a nonprofit he ran there. But once he arrived on the scene, he saw cases of heart attacks and cardiac arrest, of diarrhea and vomiting, of depression and fear.

“It just seemed like this is what I had trained to do,” he says. “This was the reason that I became a doctor.”
Singh extended his stay to 10 days, then two weeks and then three.

Months later, he’s still there — and can’t imagine leaving.

Singh had been closely following these developments from back home in New Jersey.

Each night, after working an 18-hour shift at the hospital, he would sit down with a cup of chai and catch up on the news in India.

“I was paying attention from day one,” he says. “But I never in my wildest dreams thought I would go to India.”

Read the full story, ‘An American doctor went to India last year to care for protesting farmers. The conditions on the ground convinced him to stay’ (CNN, 14 March 2021), here.

RELATED STORY:

Cardiologist tells how lies were spread to confuse protesting farmers (Asia Samachar, 29 Jan 2021)