Sheela Bhatt meets Bharti Patel, whose son Dr Vikram Patel was recently ranked one of Time magazine's 100 most influential people, to find out her recipe for a remarkable upbringing.
Time magazine's list of 100 most influential people of 2015 featured four Indians: Prime Minister Narendra Modi, Chanda Kochhar, managing director and CEO, ICICI Bank, Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella, and Dr Vikram Patel, co-founder of the Goa-based NGO Sangath which provides mental healthcare to communities with low resources.
Dr Patel, a psychiatrist, has been focusing on global mental health(external link), his passion being to raise his voice for the human rights of individuals with mental disorders. He is also a professor of international mental health at the London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine.
Dr Patel's body of work has been published in Lancet, the well-respected medical journal, and he has created immense awareness in the field of mental healthcare. As the Sangath Web site notes, 'Dr Patel studies how to treat conditions like depression and schizophrenia in low-resource communities, and he's come up with a powerful model: Training the community to help.'
Dr Patel, image, left, is known for his research in finding the link between mental disorders and poverty, and ranks along the likes of German Chancellor Angela Merkel and Japanese novelist Haruki Murakami because of his pioneering work. He is one of the founders of the Centre for Global Mental Health, having served till recently as its joint director.
In Delhi he is associated with the Centre for Chronic Conditions and Injuries at the Public Health Foundation of India.
As the co-chair of the Grand Challenges in Global Mental Health(external link), Dr Patel is passionate about identifying research priorities in global mental health. His book, Where There Is No Psychiatrist, is considered a must read for those serving people with mental disorders, while it teaches the rest of us how to approach mental health.
However, the story is not about how Dr Patel reached the pinnacle of success.
At a time when we see Arushi Talwar's convicted parents in prison or another parent, Indrani Mukerjea, in police custody suspected of having murdered her daughter, something inside society's soul gets shaken.
Sheela Bhatt spoke to Bharti Patel, Dr Patel's ageing and ailing mother, who narrates her extraordinary emotion-soaked struggle to bring up her child who saw death thrice before he went to regular school. And how 100 mothers may have contributed to the greatness of the men and women on Time's 100 most influential list.
Bhartiben is the Mother India of the 20th century for more than one reason. Her story highlights patience, wisdom, grit, value-based parvarish and boundless faith in God. A combination of value systems that provided the divine touch to Dr Vikram Patel, her loving son.
