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Where should we go after the last frontiers?

Where should the birds fly after the last sky?

Where should the plants sleep after the last breath of air?

- (Mahmoud Darwish, 1995)

Do you know that China commemorates the memory of an Indian doctor every year? He was Dr Dwarakanath Shantaram Kotnis (1910-1942), a physician from Maharashtra who spent most of his life in China. Dr Kotnis is among the ancestors and national heroes China honours during the annual Qingming festival (somewhat akin to our Karkadaka Vavu), an annual function to commemorate the ancestors. During Qingming (Tomb-sweeping Day), Chinese families visit the tombs of their departed elders to clean the gravesites and make ritual offerings. Dr Kotnis was part of the five-member Indian Medical Mission sent in 1938 to China to tend to the wounded soldiers in its resistance against the invading Japanese army.

The mission followed a request from Chinese Communist General Zhu De to Jawaharlal Nehru and was sent at the initiative of Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose. Kotnis and his colleagues became heroes for their dedication, braving extreme dangers, shortages and other hardships imposed by war. Even after the other four members returned to India later, Kotnis stayed on. He married a Chinese woman and continued serving the poor and the sick until he passed away when he was barely 32. Immortalised by director V. Santaram in the film, Dr Kotnis Ki Amar Kahani (1946), Dr Kotnis has long remained a symbol of friendship between India and China.

I remember Dr Kotnis now because contemporary Kerala has a Dr Kotnis of its own. He is Dr S S Santhosh Kumar, an orthopaedic surgeon and specialist in emergency medicine from Thiruvananthapuram, who has arguably done something virtually unparalleled among Malayalis-and perhaps Indians. Over the last four years, he has voluntarily served victims of wars, epidemics, civil strife, ethnic conflicts or natural disasters in more than 40 countries.

On leave from Kerala government’s medical service, Dr Kumar presently serves as the Director of the Project HOPE under the United Nations and shuttles between Gaza and Ukraine, where wars continue to rage with no relent. Earlier, Kumar was the South Asia Director of the famous Doctors without Borders, the Paris-based international medical humanitarian organisation also known as Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), which delivers emergency aid in conflict........

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