A wife of a rich & successful businessman & a wife of a street singer/beggar availing services of the one & the same hospital in a city like Mumbai in the year 1947?! Can you believe it?!LOL!!!
The wife of a street singer/beggar would have given birth to her child in her shanty in any slums of Mumbai. Even today,such 2(two) poles of the Indian society doesn't share same health-care facilities. Out of the question.
Rubbish. It's certainly true today, where Indian society is more divided than ever before, but would not necessarily have been the case in 1947. His family may have been wealthy, but they were black, and therefore would not have had access to the 'white only' hospitals. The British administration ran the same system in India as other parts of the Empire: wealthy natives paid for their preferential treatment, better qualified doctors, better drugs, private rooms, and so on, and in doing so, subsidised the cost of treatment for those unable to pay. Remember, not only was she pregnant, but Shiva's mother was also ill, and subsequently died. I was born in post-independance Kenya, in a mixed hospital (now black only), where my parents paid for the services rendered, and knew that they were subsidizing the treatment of poorer patients. Do you honestly think Saint Thesesa of Calcutta would have refused to treat a patient because they were too wealthy?..Oh, and BTW the city wasn't renamed Mumbai until 1995-you should refer to it as Bombay in 1947...
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
I just have to say that you just don't know anything about either the present day India or the India in 1947. Per se, there's nothing wrong in it but things get laughable when you try to give expert's opinion on both!
Of course Mumbai was not renamed in 1947 but it already was renamed when I was writing my post, so the use of the proper name, you're a block-headed person, aren't you?!!!
Actually I do know quite a bit about it... All four of my grandparents, and both of my parents were born in India, and I should have been, had my father not accepted foreign postings to Aden, Kenya and Belgian Congo (notice I call it BC, not DRC), before returning to Europe. We still have extensive family scattered over there, whom I have visited many times (and am planning another visit in early 2017), and I count myself as Anglo-Indian (not Eurasian). I'm not block-hesded, just a stickler for accuracy...
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...
Actually I do know quite a bit about it... All four of my grandparents, and both of my parents were born in India, and I should have been, had my father not accepted foreign postings to Aden, Kenya and Belgian Congo (notice I call it BC, not DRC), before returning to Europe. We still have extensive family scattered over there, whom I have visited many times (and am planning another visit in early 2017), and I count myself as Anglo-Indian (not Eurasian). I'm not block-headed, just a stickler for accuracy...
I've seen things you people wouldn't believe...