Sunday Times 2
Sacking the heart specialist
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One of my acquaintances – a rich and prominent businessman, one of those chaps who has more rupees than sense and thinks that his money entitles him to do whatever he likes – suffered a serious heart attack a few years ago. Fortunately for him he recovered, although he had to subsequently undergo a triple bypass to restore the circulation to his damaged heart. While he was recuperating I went to visit him and found him full of anger. He was placing the entire blame for this attack on his heart specialist.
“My doctor is useless” he fumed to me “I consult him regularly and pay him good money to look after me. It is his job to prevent me getting a heart attack, and now he has allowed this to happen. How can I rely on him anymore? I am going to sack him and get myself a new doctor who can do the job properly.”
Now his doctor also happens to be a friend of mine, so when I met him a few weeks later I asked him about his prominent patient.
My heart specialist friend smiled.
“This man still has not realised that to look after his health and prevent adverse events he must co-operate with me rather than expect me to do everything to protect him” he said. “For the past several months I have been repeatedly telling him that he should stop smoking and quit drinking so much whisky, that he should lose weight and that he should take the tablets I have prescribed for his blood pressure etc. regularly. When I reminded him that I had constantly been advising him about all these things and that he never listened to me, his answer was ‘But you did not tell me properly and stress how important it was. It is all your fault’ and he sacked me as his doctor.”
I was reminded about this story when I heard that our president has decided in the aftermath of the terrible events of Easter Sunday to sack the Police Chief and Defence secretary.
The Easter Sunday bombings have left all of us in a state of shock, sadness and emotional devastation. This sort of barbarism – the killing of innocent people in places of worship as well as in some of the top hotels in Colombo – cannot be comprehended by normal people.
But as we start recovering from these horrible acts that have instilled terror in not only our own people but also in visitors and potential visitors to our country, we start asking questions. Multiple suicide bombings that are so well co-ordinated require months of careful planning. Large quantities of military-grade explosives, bomb-making facilities and safe houses are necessary.
Whatever the differences individual politicians within a government have with each other, it is the sacred duty of any government to safeguard and protect its citizens so they can live and go about their day to day activities in peace and confidence. Protecting this human right of its own citizens should take greater priority than pandering to the dictates of the UN Human Rights Council.
Information freely available now confirms that Sri Lanka was warned of these terrorist attacks well before they took place, Indian intelligence sources having passed on information about a potential plot as far back as April 4.
We now know that on April 11, ten days before the events, a memo signed by DIG Priyalal Dissanayake, laying out the threat and containing a list of suspects, was circulated to a range of security services and some ministries. Sadly for us, this information appears to have not been acted upon.
Our president happens to be the minister of defence, commander of the armed forces and head of government. Yet he did not know (as he claims) – nor knew and did not take the information seriously (as other sources claim) – about this terrorist threat, and blithely went off on April 16 on a private visit to Tirumala in India to pray at the Venkateswara Hindu temple.
In January 2015 we the people of Sri Lanka made a mistake. Sadly, we all have to suffer for this mistake.
After this country suffered one of the worst terrorist atrocities in history, all that the president does is call for the resignations of his Defence Secretary and his Police Chief.
As useless an action as the man who did not take his doctor’s advice seriously, suffered a massive heart attack – and then dealt with the problem by sacking his doctor.