Last month we lost our Adhikarida, Mr Pratim Adhikari who died of IPD or Idiopathic Pulmonary Disease , a critical lungs ailing condition which is ruthlessly irreversible ,immedicable and so incurable . You can restrict the disease or at best restrain it’s fast growth but cannot recover from it or get the patient recuperated anyway. Here the destiny was known and so the journey also and here you cannot avoid it (destiny)rather than evading it and you can neither retract it(the journey)rather than retard it for sometimes more. And yes again here the options for somehow protracting or prolonging the journey also were very much limited but that never meant giving up or letting it a walkover. Every malady in life or work deserves a good fight and must be challenged tooth and nail. So our Adhikarida also gave an intense fight to his disease too critical and too complex by any means. Critical as we gradually understood the whole outer look of the disease is very much pretentious although it eroded fast the life line of the patient ie body’s absorption power of oxygen. No wounds visible , no injury exposed , no ailing or suffering in any other part of the body , its all in the suffocating ,strangling and squeezing your air blower and cut short your oxygen supply , the life gas for our existence , livingness. Complex in the sense as this disease sets , spreads and sucks incognito . No root analysis , no cause finding and so no proper solution rather than just test and try , trial and error using the patient as a guinea pig or at best expecting some miracle. Every case of this disease as we found out gradually (and yes with the guidance of the protagonist of the disease our Adhikarida) was an unique case study , very much different and mostly experimental.
While we observed the great battle from the ringside , we found more than a just colleague he was an inspiring fighter who simply took his ordeal to fight such menace underexplored and mostly inconclusively expdited head on. Going frontal with anything and everything is a character the coal people as any veteran of Coal India love to cherish whole life. Working against the odds while being posted in the rugged and rough terrain or pitted against rustic and ruthless forces like militant trade unions, unscrupulous suppliers and unforgiving bosses in the office simply make every one so seasoned wrongly or rightly , the guys here just take everything in their own stride , not only life but also life threatening disease and yes the deaths also. Here is the man I saw who took everything as a matter of fact , gave his effort to its best , and then bode us adieu very coolly ,very confidently. The death of Mr. Adhikari just reminded us two very valuable traits of our company which otherwise always boils with so many unpleasant notes and those two are , our organization never leaves its employee untreated or unattended when he or she falls ill and it always goes extra mile to secure and support the family of the person who suffers or succumbs to any disease whether to admit the best possible hospital or tendering the best possible treatment warranting guardian role to the kin of deceased to the extent possible. And the other is about our CIL men in command whom I always adore no less than commandoes in their domain of work can fight with same chivalry and valor, with equal elan in their official, personal and physical distress . Our Adhikarida’s battle was very much complex and challenging. And yes he took the challenge upfront as he took so many times in his tenure in CIL. And to a great extent we have witnessed his war with his disease although he never allowed it to spill over to the open space. He fought it alone and silently. He fought it very bravely. Given the chance , he would have tamed it , managed it , manipulated it and overcome the challenge as he has done and dealt with so many assignment with coal companies. He has just executed them so many times and with so precision , he may be one of the very successful manager who mastered the art of deal making to get the job done anyway in his domain which extended from washery to Electrical to HEMM (we heard he used to head almost half dozen deptt in his project). He always wished had he been allowed to experiment the same style to seal a deal with the disease , the way he has settled and succeeded in field works. But yes this time the whole opponent is not only fearsome but also invisible, inaccessible and invincible because world is yet to reconcile with the cause and care or cure of the pulmonary malfunction and that also too progressive one ,called fibrosis a grossly unknown and unchartered territory for the world of medics.
It was like a man was waiting for his last days and the organization, the medical world and the people surrounding were simply letting him to embrace helplessly. And from his part and perspective, he tried to keep on acting with all , at home, office, society with a pretentious wellness to camouflage the battle inside from everybody from his close aides from his wife (as he told)everybody . This all events of which we were the clueless spectators simply defined how he fought his own battle. It is more about redefining a disease rather than recuperating or recovering the irrecoverable as the name of the disease itself is self-explanatory that neither cause nor cure nothing about the disease is known till date. Idiopathic pulmonary disease or IPD as it is called, an avatar which connotes the ambiguity and convey the inability to tackle this menace which basically gets the lungs of person too stiffen and so too stressed to carry out its generic pulmonary function that is it’s contraction and expansion to allow sufficient oxygen to it. Once developed one can may try to keep his disease deferred or at distant but not decimated . In such battle zone ,the knowledge shift, the search engine, and the almighty Google just made our warrior Adhikarida more than a doctor where turf and territory began and became more tough and so the tussle with every passing day of which we were just passive observers.And the crux of such uneven battle where the opponent is yet to identified or assessed so strategising the you war just impossible is like this. When the experts and experienced gave you ultimatum and doled out the destiny as inevitable ,the only option left for you is that you become your destiny , take the control , reign in it and prevail in it. Destiny normally gets explained as counting the steps for impending death when passively submitting to it, but it also sometimes starts receding or retreating once you take the control and redefine your mission or recalibrate your lifeline. Here it is not just matter of survival but a memoir of struggle the holy and happening struggle , you love to keep it as an instance to others while you are passing your last days and nearing your death. The option never been more restricted in your life when you understand the only way to escape or evade your rival is embattle it upfront.
So the man in action our Adhikarida now kept exploring everything possible in world of medicine , the disease ,the doctor , the diagnosis and the devise to take on each and every one who or which mattered in his struggle. While the disease (IPD) by default got a free pass to confuse and confound everybody of medical fraternity to understand its root and so its rout (elimination) or remedy, this gladiator simply tried to buckle its myth (that the rogue cannot be busted). As a patient himself he just keeps shifting his role suiting with time and task. Sometimes in the role of doctor, sometime diagnostic center, sometimes data analyser ,sometimes dietitians and many time developers of the cure and support system of the disease. He was a man in the laboratory of life , a moving experiment never ever ready to relent or receive the fact that he was doing lesser than the development or study in this field till date. So it’s a new approach to the life and to the death. It is completely newer approach to keep you alive against all those uncertainties which have never been declared the risk ( a more technical comfort than the uncertainty the non rationale unseen)and never been dared to be cracked by the doctors or the researchers. The invincibility of it lies in the name while underlying diktat written on the wall. But here was this brave heart just vowed to give it full fight and vouched for his win over it.
As it was late enough to understand the enemy, so the battle demands intense retaliation.
Yes, any battle of life could have been started much earlier and so comparatively easier way provided we get to know who our enemy is inside us or outside of us. But in our life ,normalcy neither be defined nor be distinctly located till you are detected to be bugged with some uncertain blues. You are walking down the aisle with your beloved ones, you are pouring down the best wine in an antique bar with the finest music of past to revisit yourself through the memory lane or by-lanes of your past , or you just keep presenting a new initiative in your office by hooking , seeding and then signposting your dreams in the retinas of the wide eyed audience which may include your boss ,your colleague or your client and you never knew that while doing such variety of jobs in same breath you are also entering in future deal with some suffering and sorrow with its allied pain and pricking (which may end as fatal or fearsome to the least of knowledge)through some infection (from outside)or some inflammation (from within). For this man also happened the same. While he was cultivating more his power of managing which he rightly described as mastering the art of operational excellence and tactical manoeuvre you may call it sometimes manipulation (as he always described) to the extent possible in very much commensuration with the way his company normally demands ,the incurable disease called ILD started renting his lungs without his knowledge. While he was expanding his empire of power and position to grab and grasp very nuances to run almost half dozen departments in his area of posting at one go , his lungs got just contracted and constricted to allow to be run full throttle. When he was inflating the efficiency of him and his project he was working with by smart and fast maneuvering different deals inside , outside more in the line of informal thinking of the organization we are working in , his alveolus got deflated and so oxygen flow got restricted if not reduced. In his own confession it was a conflict between greed(of power) and grind(of performing) which grew gradually to this gruesome disease he never imagined neither was prepared to fight. But it was inevitable as the continuous exposure to the thick cloud of finer coal dust of the washery , CHP just created a huge churn inside the arteries and veins of the body as it does in the hopper of jig to segregate and size the coal. It was unstoppable as the power to absorb so much black particles simply was overestimated while compared to our power to absorb all those black humors like full sarcasm and cynicism about coal. So the man who was in command over his job and jugglery of management to execute every assignment perfectly tuned to the wish of the company , could not simply judge the pulse or pulmonary malfunction inside his own body. It was so ironic as well as invincible , that Mr Adhikari simply got overwhelmed , overpowered and yes the first time ever in his life so helplessly. First time because as the storylines shared by the man simply spoke a lot about how he triumphed over or tricked over so many odds he had to face in his life sometimes by dribbling sometimes by daring but never skirting it or shunning responsibilities. It is usual and universal for Coal people and so for Mr Adhikari. And while grown his fibrosis (the generic name of the disease) silently and got informed of its progressiveness(irreversible , incurable and yes indescribable and so idiopathic in short) , the man in command simply got shaken at first instance but that was for sometimes to adjust and assess the uncertainty and unchartered territory he had to tread onwards. He then took the disease by its horn , consulting doctors, googling every symptoms , tracking every minutes of his pulse rate, oxygen concentration and yes continuously strategizing restrategizing the medication, habits etc.
While putting a dynamic diagnostic and treatment procedure which sometimes went overboard , the man got its grasp over the knowledge of the growth, acceleration the whole movement of the maladies but not the ways to check it , contain it. It was like you can feel your decay , deterioration and you also feel that it is inevitable , so the best thing you can do is that you can witness your journey and accordingly time with your different doable or duties before it was over. Adhikarida simply did that. He was fighting hard and hurried in two fronts. In one side he was monitoring and whenever possible mending his life style, medication and yes the philosophy of life . In other front he was organizing everything to reinforce support system to his family in his absence. As a veteran , he just kept doing the both so coolly and confidently as if he must not have repented beyond life . Tell it his natural organization skill or affectionate being as father or husband , he simply did the both with equal elan and passed away in a very calculated style. Amazingly he was so confident about his days left in life . In fact barring the last mesh up of some over medication or alternate medication which can be hardly told wrong one , he might have not repented anything he has done to keep fighting the disease as gladiator .
Adhikarida is no more and we are intensely aggrieved with his demise however inevitable it was . We have to take long time to get along with the reality as we are not Adhhikarida confident and composed while living and while dying . As every death or demise must prove how much alive or lively we were and so here proved by Adhikarida not just by his a very amicable , jovial life but also a stoic , stolid death.