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Another doctor, a surgeon, has to travel every day to and from his clinic via the Ganga Bridge across the Ganges. It can take hours: there’s too much traffic and in places the bridge is falling into the river. How does he cope with the challenge of trying to operate on his patients when at any moment the electricity might go off? It’s ‘extremely stressful’, he says. Every morning he, too, spends two minutes in prayer once he arrives at the clinic, to shake off the exhaustion of the journey, ‘so that I can perform as a doctor’.
For Anita, living in a village of mud huts far from Patna, ‘Money is everything.’ She was married ‘as a child’ but hardly sees her husband as he spends most of his time in the city selling ice cream. She works her fields of rice and wheat alone and is determined her four children will have enough schooling to find good jobs away from the village. Education is her only weapon against poverty, of circumstance and expectation.
In contrast Justin Rowlatt on Saturday was talking to software entrepreneurs in Bangalore for the series Six Routes To A Richer World. He discovered the level of commitment required to succeed: one of the young experts he spoke to had grown up in a village in Tamil Nadu but through his mother’s determination was given the chance to go to college. Once there, he worked 20 hours a day, every day, to hone his software skills.
Six Routes is a hybrid series made by the BBC in conjunction with Marketplace, an American radio show. Rowlatt’s investigations were paired with those of an American reporter in an uneasy combination that dissipated the energy of the programme because in just half an hour we heard from too many voices, too many points of view. Somehow the point of the programme got lost. The complicated scheme to provide every Indian with a digitally coded identity card (almost 770 million have so far been issued) was mentioned, but not its controversial aspects. How much is the scheme about control, and how much about income generation for the 92 per cent of Indians not in formal employment?
Monday’s afternoon play on Radio 4, Kingdom of Cloud, by Matthew Hurt, was just the kind of play I most missed in my time away. A two-hander (played by Neil Pearson and Anne-Marie Duff and directed by Marion Nancarrow), there was little plot and hardly any drama, apart from the shattering of a glass of red wine. Daniel is struggling to face up to what’s been really going on with his job and his marriage. He’s not a particularly nice character, nor is Juliet his wife, too self-absorbed for sympathy. But it packed a punch as they both unravel, not wildly or savagely, but in a most ordinary, everyday fashion.
Speaking of ‘everyday’, the one thing I needed to check out when I got back was whether the great Brookfield sale was still going ahead. I didn’t expect to hear that half of Ambridge had been destroyed.
Because you read about bbc radio 4
Also by Kate Chisholm
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