The Hindu Business Line : Healing touch of Freemasonry

I love reading fiction… and if you find me laughing at midnight, then I must be re-reading one of my favourite books from my collection of P.G. Wodehouse, who is my favourite writer.”

A veteran neurologist of several decades, B. Biswakumar is a voracious reader. Right from all the books of Dan Brown to professional literature on the Net; he pores through all of it. After about 10-11 hours of seeing patients, he spends “at lea st one hour a day reading on the Net to upgrade my knowledge in my profession. It’s an excellent tool; I can tell you what was published in the US yesterday.”

On November 21, he will be installed as Grand Master of the Grand Lodge of India, an honour a Chennaite gets after 30 long years. This is his 33rd year in Freemasonry and there’s an interesting story behind how he joined it.

The son of a bank manager from Kumbakonam in Tamil Nadu, Biswakumar did his MBBS from the Madurai Medical College in 1962. But while an intern, patriotic fervour following the Indo-China war of 1962 drove him to the Indian Army. Doctors were being recruited in the Emergency Commission and he joined as a fresh MBBS graduate. After internship, he was first posted to Pathankot in Punjab and then Jammu and Kashmir; “I was in the camps… field service where we were not in contact with any city and I looked after the jawans. I saw the 1965 war at close quarters; it was a gruelling, gory, horrible experience of seeing death at near hand. A shell fell on my bunker which was a dud and didn’t burst!”

He left the Army’s Medical Corps as a captain in 1967, but kept in touch with army friends. Once, dining with some of them, he “met a few ‘brothers’ whose behaviour exhibited a lot of harmony and friendship and I was impressed by the way they behaved with everybody. I asked if there was anything special about them and was told they belonged to an organisation called Freemasons.” Would you like to join, he was asked. “So I joined, and took to it like fish to water,” he grins.

That was in 1977; but before that he completed his MD from JIPMER, Pondicherry, and joined the Institute of Neurology at the Madras Medical College in 1970 as an honorary assistant. Here he worked with Prof B. Ramamurthy, whom he remembers as an “excellent man, hard taskmaster, great teacher, great clinician, wonderful surgeon and above all a wonderful human being.” He stayed at MMC till 1987 after which he joined the Ramachandra Medical College as Professor of Neurology for a short term.

Commercialisation, capitation

About the changing trends in the medical profession, he admits that “the profession has become a little commercialised for various reasons. Corporate culture has come in; and patients’ demands are more because of better knowledge and ability to grasp things from the Internet. Their sources of information are more varied, so demands are more, sometimes even unreasonable.”

Biswakumar says that while “transparency from the doctor is absolutely essential, there is always the need-to-know-basis. Beyond a certain point if you give details to a patient about his condition it only scares him. There is no need for them to know everything, as is done in the US. That is silly.”

He defines a patient as somebody who has “implicit faith in me and hence comes to me and I exhibit the same amount of loyalty in him. My caregiving should match his faith in me. That is a beautiful relationship… a close bond between doctor and patient. If disturbed for a commercial reason, it becomes an unhealthy relationship, but unfortunately this is happening.”

He is, however, happy to have some old patients whom he cherishes. “They look up to me for advice – not necessarily medical. I’ve become a kind of counsellor to them.”

Biswakumar sees capitation fees in medical education as an “unhealthy trend. I understand people have to invest a lot of money to build up quality institutions and they can charge reasonable fees, but not through capitation.”

Of course, it would be ideal for the government to be in professional education, “but it can’t provide the required number of seats to meet the demand. So there has to be provision for private medical and dental colleges, but there should be no capitation fees, which is like selling education.”

On a super-speciality like neurology not being available to a majority of Indians, Biswakumar, well known for his charitable work, says at a personal level he had served Melmaruvathur, about 100 km from Chennai, for over 10 years. “And in my OP, I used to get patients from as far as Thanjavur district, and a large percentage of my patients get free consultation even today.”

But on such compassion being displayed by younger professionals, he says, “I really don’t know, so can’t comment on it. But just as I followed the principles set down by my teacher, I can vouch that most of my students have followed my example.”

On the quality of neurological services available, he says thanks to the setting up of “corporate hospitals and availability of equipment, we are on par with any centre in the world. The clinical knowledge of our doctors is quite good. First of all, when the patient talks to me, my diagnosis is made. But I then do the clinical examination only to confirm what I have already found out. That is how a neurologist should work. The machines are there only to prove or disprove a point and take you for further management. They are not there as a diagnostic tool in the first instance. The most important diagnostic tool is your own brain.”

Of course, the CT scan, with all its modifications, is a great boon to the speciality. “To a large extent, even today our clinical diagnosis stands, but sometimes we are taken by surprise by the technological advancement.” As for the future, he would like the speciality “to be patient- and not hospital- or lab-oriented. I would like the one-to-one relationship between patient and doctor, but from when I started that relationship is no longer the strong bond it used to be.”

Freemasonry

A passionate Freemason, his priority as Grandmaster will be to make the Indian Grand Lodge a more cohesive unit and expand its base. “In India we have only 20,000 Masons which is a poor number. But Masonry has to grow not merely through numbers but by maintaining quality. We would like people of high moral stature who believe in God, to join us.” To the exclamation of surprise he says, “Oh yes, that’s a primary qualification; we don’t take agnostics or atheists. The first question asked of a candidate is, ‘Do you believe in a supreme being?’; we don’t name the God. We are religious people but we don’t practise religion. Each member is encouraged to follow his faith, we don’t interfere in that.”

He says that though the country is sadly getting polarised along communal lines, Freemasonry is the “most secular organisation. Before we start our meetings, we have the sacred books from five religions including Hinduism, Christianity and Islam, placed on the altar. ”

But he wants the organisation to become a little more transparent, and the November 21 event has been opened to non-Masons. “Of course, we can’t throw open our meetings to everyone. But such events can tell people we’re not a secret society, even though we do have secrets, like any other organisation.”

Dan Brown and masonry

So, what does he think of the Dan Brown books?

An avid reader, he has read all his books. “It is all fiction; he has used a lot of imagination and Masonry as a nuclear point and developed on it. The previous books were not very favourably disposed towards Masonry, and made people look at it with suspicions. But the recent book, The Last Symbol, has projected Masonry in a good way. On page 99 he says masons are the most honest, virtuous, trustworthy people in society!”

Biswakumar adds that while Freemasons do a lot of charity, they don’t publicise it. “The Masons of America do charity worth $1.5 million a day; it is mindboggling, but nobody talks of Masonic charity. We have established institutions such as polyclinics and schools in Delhi, a paediatric hospital in Coimbatore, run free clinics in Chennai, give scholarships, help old-age homes, war widows. But we don’t talk about it.”

Asked about the gender barrier, he smiles and says, “I expected this question! This institution comes from Europe from the 18th century. We are in India from 1729, and not many things have changed, at least in our parent organisation, the United Grand Lodge of England. Now, all of a sudden, we can’t do something different.”

But a beginning has been made in many parallel organisations being set up for women; women’s Lodges have come up in England “with their own grandmasters. For instance, the Theosophical Society is only an offshoot of the Masonic Lodge; their rituals are practically the same as ours. Who knows, one day this might happen in India.”

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