The passing away of the nationally and internationally renowned cardiologist Dr KM Cherian has shocked the world in more ways than one. On January 25, 2025, after attending a wedding ceremony in Bangalore, he collapsed due to a cardiac arrest and breathed his last while being taken to Manipal Hospital.

Cherian had many firsts to his credit. He performed India's first coronary artery bypass surgery. He also accomplished the first heart-lung transplant.

He was a well-known pioneer in pediatric cardiac surgery in India. For a time, he was an honorary surgeon to the President of India. For his illustrious service in the medical field, he was awarded the Padma Shri.

He set up Frontier Lifeline Hospital in Chennai and Frontier Mediville, a premier medical science park on the outskirts of Chennai. The primary purpose was to promote research into the production of indigenous cardiac valves.

Today, science and technology are at our fingertips. A surgeon can perform heart surgery on a patient in another country from his own home. But whatever our skills and capabilities, we cannot evade the hand of God, who controls our destiny, our very being, and our every step. God controls the life of a heart surgeon, too, and arrests his heartbeat when He, the Creator, decides. Science is not the ultimate answer.

The 17th-century poet, dramatist and tragedian James Shirley's poem reveals the eternal truth:

The glories of our blood and state
Are shadows, not substantial things;
There is no armour against Fate;
Death lays his icy hand on kings:
Sceptre and Crown
Must tumble down,
And in the dust be equal made
With the poor crookèd scythe and spade.

With our scientific skills, we can put men and women in orbit or make them land on the moon. But we also failed to bring them back (Kalpana Chawla and her companions lost their lives. She was one of the seven crew members who reportedly died in the Space Shuttle Columbia when the spacecraft disintegrated during its reentry into the Earth's atmosphere on February 1, 2003).

Though Cherian won accolades and glories, he did not revel in them. He had the honesty to say that, as a schoolboy, he went to school barefoot and even 'flunked' in maths with five marks. But his calculations were different. A student of Kasturba Medical College, Manipal, he became a professor at the Christian Medical College, Vellore. Later, he was trained under expert medical guides in Australia and New Zealand. Amid tempting offers from foreign medical centres, Cherian chose to turn his steps back to his motherland.

His fifty-plus years of humane service in the medical world are an illustrious example of a human person who used his God-given gifts to serve humanity.

Shirley reminds us:

Your heads must come
To the cold tomb:
Only the actions of the just
Smell sweet and blossom in their dust.

We can be assured that this great person's actions smell "sweet and blossom in their dust."

Cherian revealed his professional secret: He considered every patient his 'family member,' hence his kind service. He joyfully recalled with relish that he had the fortune of performing a complicated heart surgery on a child in Calcutta (now Kolkata) at Mother Teresa's request. He did it at a minimal cost.

I personally knew a Bengali doctor who practised as a local surgeon in Jharkhand's Dumka. His name was Akshay Das. Santhals endearingly called him 'Okoe doctor.' He was a gentle doctor who would converse with the patients and put them at ease as if conversing with a friend before he made prescriptions. With such preliminaries, 50 per cent of the treatment was already done.

But most often, we encounter doctors in a hurry. Before they listen to the patient fully, their pens are active, scribbling a string of medicines illegibly as if they had a secret deal with the next-door medical shops. Some, hand in glove with medical labs, shove you to them with a recommendation for a battery of medical tests. Some do a flourishing business of rushing patients to ventilators even after the patients have passed away.

There is much to be desired from the medical world. It should not treat patients in Shylock style as victims to be bled. There are hospitals that started with much fanfare as charitable institutions, but they graduate to extortionist methods with hiking charges unnecessarily for services.

Most doctors or hospitals charge registration fees every twenty days or so, even when patients have been consulting them for a decade or more.

Persons like the late Dr Cherian are pathbreakers who serve humanity as a noble cause, not a business option. "Their actions...smell sweet and blossom in their dust." May their tribe increase!