A stitch in time

remember the day when Yasin Malik was admitted to AIIMS, and I along with a team of doctors had a meeting whether to operate on him. He was brought directly from Tihar

Jail after he complained of chest pain,8221; says Dr Kaul, who received the XVIII National Excellence Award on January 26 this year. 8220;I remember doctors suggesting that if anything happens to Yasin under the supervision of a Kashmiri Pandit doctor, Kashmir will erupt8230;I met Yasin and convinced him. And he, in writing, expressed his faith in me and I operated successfully.8221;

It was a job, he says, performed while maintaining his memories of the migration of thousands of

Kashmiri Pandits and top-notch Muslim bureaucrats. 8220;I was aware of the fact that Kashmiri people as a whole have suffered, and, I was aware of the genesis of militancy that has roots in political and social injustice,8221; says Dr Kaul.

Even while militancy broke out in Kashmir in 1989, Kaul was the only Pandit doctor to keep his practice going. 8220;Kashmiri people needed me the most in the times of turbulence, and I fulfilled my responsibility of being a Kashmiri.8221;

Now, as a cardiologist known among the best in south Asia, Kaul attends to hundreds of Kashmiris when he takes his two-month vacation to the Valley. Recently, the J-K government had to provide him a room so he could operate on hundreds of patients, mostly Muslims, during his stay there.

In the Capital, he has a unique reputation 8212; a favourite among separatists. From Yasin Malik to People8217;s Conference founder Abdul Gani Lone People, who was killed by gunmen in Kashmir in 2002, to Syed Ali Shah Geelani, chairman of the hardline faction of the Hurriyat Conference to Hashim Qureshi, who hijacked an Indian airliner in 1984 to Shabir Ahmad Shah who served jail 10 years and heads the Democratic Freedom Party, they have all been on Kaul8217;s table.

8220;When I was treating Lone sahib, he told me that in independent Kashmir, we will need you to revamp the healthcare sector and to bring it back on rails,8221; recalls the Padma Shri awardee. There has been diametrically opposite talk in the doctor8217;s chambers too, when Chief Minister Ghulam Nabi Azad or his predecessor, Mufti Muhammad Sayeed, came visiting.

There is only one way Dr Kaul sees it: 8220;Forget the past to live in harmony in future. We are interdependent on each other, rather incomplete without each other.8221;

The key, he says, is reach. Now director of the cardiology department for Fortis, Dr Kaul sees beyond his 15,000 surgeries. The moment of pride, he says, is 8220;when I see Kashmiri illiterate fisherwomen busy exercising what I had prescribed through talks on Srinagar Radio8221;.