அவர் வீடு/ROOM 150 SQFT  இருக்கலாம்.  ஒரு மூலையில் புத்தகங்கள். மறு மூலையில் சிறிய படுக்கை. அடுத்த மூலையில் சில சமையல் சாதனைகள்.  அவருக்கு மெலிதான தேகம்.  மிக மெல்லிய குரல்.  ராஜாஜியும் / கமராஜறும் / TTK யும் அவரிடம் பெரு மதிப்பு வைத்து இருந்தார்கள்;  சாதனை மனிதரின் / INSTITUTION ன் கதை.

CELEBRATING YEAR-long a golden jubilee of service to the economically weaker sections of the people in West Mambalam from September 20 is the Public Health Centre on Lake View Road. It is a celebration that will also feature yet another block being added to this pioneering community hospital. The new block, hopefully to be ready to mark the 50th anniversary of the start of the PHC in September 1952, will be named after the PHC’s founder, M.C. Subrahmanyam, that Gandhian journalist who all his life shunned the limelight.

I wonder what `MC’ must be thinking about the intention, watching it from somewhere up there. I’ve seldom met a person who did more for an institution or spent more time in it, yet wanted to be less known for his contribution to it and its growth.

It was while T.T. Krishnamachari was campaigning in West Mambalam in the early 1950s that the Central Minister who was to grace many a portfolio, expressed his dismay at this little corner of India that seemed to lack every amenity you could think of, and, most of all, medical facilities. Among the journalists listening to him was a friend, a resident of West Mambalam and an old-school Gandhian, who believed in service before self. `MC’, always in immaculate white khadi veshti and shirt, was also one of those old school journalists of Madras, removed in many ways from the culture and society of the language they worked in, yet scholarly fluent in the writing and speaking of it. What a contrast we were, I used to think, when we first met in the late 1960s and became unlikely friends over the next twenty years and more.

By then the PHC had become fairly well established, and `MC’ had retired from the Sunday Express after a stint in the Government’s Information Department. Working together, we often found time for a natter especially when a by then `retired’ TTK dropped in to do the same with his friend. That’s when I learnt of the thatched shed beginnings in a slum over-run area, the struggle to put up the first buildings and get permanent staff, the help from the TTK and TVS institutions and, later, the service organisations, and the generosity of numerous specialists and doctors who freely gave of their time and enabled the PHC to meet the needs of a growing community. It was a saga `MC’ should have recorded but never did; a pity, for it would have given valuable insights into how a small group of volunteers with little in their purses, but determination in their hearts provided, first, basic medical services, then, more sophisticated ones for a community that had even less than them.

Two things he did write, however, I remember well. While in Government service he had helped produce — I think it was for the Queen’s visit — a booklet on Tamil Nadu that, if someone could find a copy, would still be considered an outstanding brochure to `sell’ the State as a tourist destination. The other was a learned, but lucid, brochure on Mahabalipuram that deserves to be in print forever, but is sadly not appreciated by the publishers or the hawkers.

During his last years, `MC’ moved on to edit The Indian Review, that grand old journal of erudition founded by G.A. Natesan. T.T.K. then, after his death, R. Venkatraman wrote its op-ed pieces during `MC’s days at the helm. And he got me to find time away from the world of management, production and commerce to write again. “Don’t let running a factory every stop you from writing,” he had said. And so I continue to write, always remembering `MC’, whose world of self-sacrifice and dedication to the less privileged was a world apart from mine. He might not appreciate his being remembered in the new block at the PHC, but it’s time his name was carved in stone in remembrance of what he did for medicare in West Mambalam over a period of 40 years and more.

Ref : The Hindu