It's a service Gopalakrishnan has been at with tireless regularity for over 16 years. Arranging difficult-to-find hospital beds or appointments with doctors, procuring blood, life-saving drugs that need to be imported or ordered over e-mail, even finding finance for those who can't afford expensive but essential treatments.
Gopalakrishnan donned this unlikely role of messiah in 1982 when his cousin fell gravely ill. It was easier arranging for the brain tumour operation than finding a bed, or organising the right units of blood. It was then that Gopalakrishnan realised how traumatised a patient's relatives are, particularly when they need to fortify him emotionally. At around this time, Gopalakrishnan's boss Gopechand J. Menghani's brother-in-law was admitted to the same hospital in a state of coma. As they braced for a kidney transplant, Gopalakrishnan saw his own experience being repeated—the family was ill-equipped for the crisis, deluged by the list of requirements handed out by a hospital staff too busy to guide them. Gopalakrishnan pitched in. By now he was helping out families of other patients in the general ward. This work kept him increasingly away from office, but his chief, knowing the depth of his concern for the ill, always paid him his salary in full. But Gopalakrishnan, who wouldn't accept charity, branched out as an insurance agent, allowing himself time to attend to his calling. He also mans a recruitment agency that ensures he can set aside 7 am to 2 pm daily to attend to all those who appeal to him.
It can be a knock at midnight, a despairing phonecall, a letter, even a mere slip of paper bearing his name. "Please help my friend," writes a desperate S. Qamaruddin from Jeddah. "He has elephantiasis." The Saudi Arabian embassy requests him to arrange for a Jaipur foot. In cases such as the latter, he charges five per cent of the agency's expenses, but attends all calls from Mumbai for free. "Till date I haven't bought him a cup of chai," says a grateful G. Verghese (name changed), whom Gopalakrishnan had helped through his second heart attack. "My wife, who knew him at work, just rang him the minute I experienced the attack. He arranged immediately for a doctor, organised a hospital bed. I suffered a third attack. He was with us throughout. When my wife told him we couldn't afford the lakhs of rupees needed, he arranged for Dr Lekha Pathak to do both the angiography and the angioplasty for just Rs 20,000," says the misty-eyed chartered accountant.
Dr Jehangir Sorabjee, physician at Bombay Hospital, confirms: "He's a sincere fellow. The Arabs who land up in Mumbai for medicare are hounded and cheated by touts, who also take a commission from doctors. But Arabs know they're safe with Gopalakrishnan." Which may explain why the first call of some overseas patients is invariably the Gopalakrishnan number.
He assiduously set out writing to hospitals and doctors, cultivating those who could accommodate the stricken within a budget, or in an emergency. "I realised it was not the illness that consumed a patient, but his helplessness that infected even his relatives. Most of us are completely unprepared. If you help them tide over this immediate crisis they can give him life-saving moral support," says Gopalakrishnan. Today he has a list of over 2,000 volunteers who come on call to donate blood—however rare the blood group. He has also collected a list of 600 trusts to which he directs needy patients. "It had started out as a personal experience, but now it's my life's work," says the good samaritan even as he reaches out to attend yet another call. At (022)8748043/8757051.