"...but we came before them..."

"...but we came before them..." 

...said the lady, raising her hands in protest. 

Yesterday evening, we were at a clinic. Our token read "9". "3" was already in with the doctor. Just then, a lady walked in & the assistant gave her an assuring look. "3" came out & the lady was sent in next, as "4" to "11" watched, confused. One of them (she was "5") asked the assistant "What just happened? We've been waiting & you send her out of turn?" The assistant just smiled, but "5" was in no mood to let go, so she demanded an explanation. "That lady has a critical issue that requires an urgent surgery, hence sir had asked me to let her in as soon as she came,'' the assistant said. "But our time is important too..." she retorted, but then backed off, half-convinced.

At that moment, a recent graphic I had seen around "Equality" & "Equity" sprang up in my mind. "Equality" would mean each of us should go in based on our turns. But if the doctor's assessment was right, the lady that barged in probably needed the doctor's time on a higher priority than the rest of us. That was "Equity".

But this graphic I had seen also had 2 more parts labelled "Reality" & "Liberation". So I pondered how I could apply those two to the availability of doctors/hospitals.

"Reality" is probably the fact that good doctors/hospitals that charge high fees are only accessible to the financially well off (easily) & the middle class (on occasions they need them badly). They are practically out of reach for people at the bottom of the pyramid.

"Liberation" is probably a situation where everyone has access to every doctor & every hospital irrespective of their paying capacity. But obviously, such a world would only exist in an episode of Black Mirror, if at all.

On the way back home, as I drove down the flyover, I saw a chauffer driven white Mercedes coming from the other end with a doctor's sign on the wind shield. I turned my head sideways to look at the person sitting in the back seat. He turned out to be someone from my old neighborhood. In the 1990s, the grapevine had it that he had got through a good medical college as he was from a backward caste (he got a reserved seat) and his super rich father had paid a handsome donation (the most abused term in colleges) to secure the admission. And then the very next moment, I thought about a hard-working upper caste Brahmin friend from a lower middle class family who had missed an IIM cut-off by a whisker, as he watched reserved category candidates (some of them from rich affluent families) with much lower percentile go past him.

Perhaps equity should not be about caste but about the economically weaker getting a fair share of the pie (and even then, probably not 50% of the pie, leaving other deserving prospects high & dry), I thought, as I parked my car.

The doctor's visit went well. And no, I wasn't thinking about his caste after this whole incident. Erm, well, definitely not for more than 2 seconds, I swear.