COCKROACH Janta Party founder Abhijeet Dipke revealed a crucial fact about himself to Newslaundry’s Manisha Pande. He said he had seen Shahrukh Khan’s 2002 movie Swades (‘My country’) many times over since he was a child and he finds it inspirational. So, I too switched on YouTube and saw it to the extent one could.

The story is about an Indian engineer at Nasa who misses home and goes on a visit to meet the lady who raised him upon his parents’ death in a car accident. The journey takes him to a village facing chronic power outages and where he also meets Kaveri Amma’s pretty ward Gita who is struggling to run a village school. So, the hero, while living out of a caravan trailer, builds a water reservoir from a tiny stream seeping from a rocky slope to ply a turbine he has assembled. The villagers get their steady power, leaving the hero to canvass support for the underprivileged children to join the struggling school. They do so by defying entrenched caste- and poverty-related odds.

The turbine event comes across as a band-aid for a country that has handed early dreams of affordable and universal healthcare to private buccaneers. The state-run National Eligibility cum Entrance Test (NEET) where corruption is rampant — which triggered Dipke’s Cockroach campaign — produces 137,000 doctors against 20 million applicants. Many who succeed go abroad to follow their dreams.

The phenomenon was seen as brain drain during the early years of India’s independence and there’s a news clip of Nehru on a US visit urging Indian professionals there to return home.........

© Dawn