Most of us have careers. Only a minute fraction make it a calling. We're honored to bring Dr. Srinivasan, one of the founders of Jeevan Blood Bank, onto the podcast.
Along with his dedicated team, he pioneered the setting up of standards for testing, storage and distribution of safe blood in India. He also helped to formulate the policy that was passed by the government.
Dr. Srinivasan is also an avid photographer and has travelled the world to capture wildlife and nature in all its glory. It has, in a sense, become his second career.
This is episode 15 of My First Job, the podcast that covers engaging career journeys, and every single one is full of twists, turns and insights.
My name is Venu Gopal Nair. I'm the host of this podcast and CEO of Ideascape Communications, an advertising agency into branding, creative and design. So, settle in, sit back and enjoy the conversation.
There is a reference in the show to a pivotal scene from the blockbuster Hindi film Amar Akbar Anthony, which released in 1977. The three heroes were hooked up to a blood transfusion machine, and while that brought the audience to its feet, it was bad science.
Dr. Srinivasan was toiling away in the real world, bringing about monumental change. Only a few of us will know, let alone acknowledge, his contribution. Dr. Srinivasan, welcome to the show.
Thanks, Venu. Thanks for bringing me on to this show.
It's a pleasure and an honour. You said you returned to photography, because this is one aspect of you that I didn't know. So how did that come about?
Well, actually, my journey, like most of the photographers, were passionate about the art. I still keep calling this an art. It all started when I was 11 years old with a box camera.
That is okay. It was a pastime, buying film and then loading it in the camera, taking the pictures and then waiting for the results to come out.
I had a pretty good classmate, very nice person, whose uncle had a studio. I'm talking about 50s, rather early 60s in Tuticorin.
I ended up in the darkroom there and started learning the tricks. Everything was going well. Finished my MBBS, still I was still shooting a bit. Then came up my first accidental entrepreneurship of starting Lister Laboratory in 1985.
That took me away. The camera went to the back burner, my darkroom, everything went off. Until 2006, something happy happens. There has to be also something else triggering that.
In 2006, for the first time, I was told I had brains, because I had to have a CT scan. I had something sitting inside my brain which needed to be removed.
That forced me to sit at home. I realized what I was missing all these years in the garden. That rekindled the passion to get back to photography.
Like anybody's dream, buy a DSLR and all those things, I got it. That is now keeping me alive and creative.
Wonderful. Why don't we go over some of the shots that you have taken?
I presume you picked it up from my website natureimages.in. Yes. There are two pictures here.
But it's not just a silhouette, but that lovely golden hairline that you've managed to capture. And that moment when the cheetah is just leaping off that.
I have something really funny to say about that line. It is from Serengeti at sunset. Everybody was there on the western side of the line shooting about 10-12 jeeps.
But I told my guy to go to the opposite side. So, this guy thought I was crazy and everybody was saying, here, here, here. But I was here because I had something else in my mind and this is the result.
Wow. It's really an amazing shot. It's very hard to get this kind of a look. Cheetahs generally don't get onto the trees.
But this one in Mara was chased by a hyena. I think out of fear, it went on like Kannadasan's thing,
It went up fast. But it didn't know how to come down. It took almost 2.5 hours of waiting for me to let it come down to catch this frame.
Patience in wilderness. Yeah. Serves you well in so many fields. And the birds in flight. It would have been one shot if you had captured only the birds in the water.
But there's another flock up in the air. Yeah. This one is again in Africa and it's in Bosnia, if my memory is right.
And yeah, you're absolutely right. It's a question of balancing the frame.
Again, this is so beautifully framed. This person sitting in the exact middle of the whole.
This one is Enroute Annapurna Base Camp. My first ever major trek in my life. Unforgettable. And after that, I have done dozens.
It's interesting, the man sitting and enjoying the whole spread of mountains.
This, first I thought that it was simply a streak of brown. But I think you told me that this is a sandstorm and snow, both in the same picture.
It is. Yeah, it is somewhere in the autumn. It's in the Hanley region while we were driving down.
We saw the sandstorm and decided to stop instead of driving fast and wait and see what's happening. I'm glad I was there at the right time.
It's amazing in terms of colors. This is, there's a lot of talk of auroras now, but this is so fascinating.
Yeah, auroras in uncommon areas, Canada, UK, Australia.
This I was standing in the middle of the water at which was somewhere around three, two, three degrees. It was in Fairbanks.
The one lesson out of photography is that I think we all need to have an alternate way of letting out our creativity, spending our time.
If we don't have that, I think we'll succumb to the current pressures and other events happening around us.
Why don't we start from the time you, since we call it my first job, I normally spend a few minutes on, you know, how far away from that first job most people end up or they go so much deeper.
I understand. My first job was actually on the 1st of January, 1981, soon after I passed my MD in internal medicine. I took up a position as a full-time physician in one of the hospitals in North Madras, run by Church of South India, CSI Rainey Hospital.
Young blood, that was a springboard for me. I learned all the medicine I knew in those few years where I worked there.
It's not just that. We didn't have ultrasound. We didn't have, it's a simple x-ray is the only tool that we have, plus all the clinical techniques that we were taught by our great teachers of those days to diagnose and manage patients.
That's something that's amazing. And still patients survive despite us not using equipments.
I'm very happy that that gave the experience, the courage, the ability to perform biopsies, tapping the heart with fluids, all those blindly with the anatomy, anatomical knowledge that we were taught and we understood.
It all went well. That time in the same hospital is what was lacking was a laboratory. If I need to get the parameters done, I need to wait for 24 hours, sometimes even 36 hours to get the result, to decide what line of treatment.
I started spending time in that small laboratory, talking to the technicians there at that time. They're so dedicated, a bunch of people.
I said that unless I have a good laboratory, there's no way of practicing good medicine, not only for me, for the entire hospitals needed.
I was given a free hand. I started looking around, going and seeing places and then see what can be done.
Slowly I was involved in building up that place. I'm talking about early 80s, a very modern laboratory for the hospital which can turn around results so quickly with even some of the equipments were not existing in private laboratories.
The hospital had access to funds, donations from Church of Scotland, EZE and all those things.
Looking back at that time, I never knew why I was doing that, number one. Number two, I had an opportunity at that time to go to UK to present a paper because someone who was supposed to go could not go.
When I was there at the conference, I was offered a full-time job in SAS, whether I was trained in US, UK. I said I'm in a corner from India, etc.
I refused and came back. But in 1984, I had the opportunity of going back to UK again as a senior registrar, which was a locum job, which was given with all the exemptions possible, not writing local exams.
That was the serendipity. When I entered there, I went on a long leave. When I came back, it so happened, it was unpleasant for me to again, the young blood in me couldn't tolerate that I had to report to somebody else who was much junior to me.
So, I decided overnight to walk out. I was thinking what I'm going to do. That was the time four of my former colleagues in the laboratory came up and said,
Sir, you're a doctor, you know what test to ask and you also built up the lab. You know what you can deliver. Why don't you start a lab?
He will come and work with you, not work for me, work with me. I still remember this sentence. I said, I don't even know when to start making money.
They said the three of them are girls and one was a boy. He said, you please pay only Ravi because he needs the money. My husband's earning right now. Whenever you can pay.
They put this thought in my head. So, that's why I called. I'm an accidental laboratory man. On June 6th, 1985, I started Lister Laboratory. Rest is history.
So, I called the invasion of diagnostics just like the Normandy on June 6th.
So, Lister was the beginning.
Lister was the beginning. It was 1985. For some reason, every 10 years something has been happening in my life right from 1985.
In fact, if you took it, it goes back to 1975. I was just thinking this morning. 75 is the time I finished my MBBS.
65 is the time I wanted to be a doctor because my grandfather was in death bed. That was the time around Christine Burner did her transplant. I wanted to do transplant.
It's all some infatuation at that. So, 65, 75, 85, 95 came and then we started Jeevan Blood Bank as not for profit which today people talk of CSR which never write.
Three letter word, three letters didn't exist at that time. That thanks to my colleague Dr. Saranya whom even today we work together in Jeevan after 46 years. Is that correct?
1985. We are almost there. Yeah, 46 years. But she came up with some mind blowing data about people who had tested positive arypiditis B, C and HIV and also had a history of transfusion.
We don't have a way of proving it but they had transfusion. They also had this disease. Possibly if not all majority of them diseases caused by the transfusion they might have received.
That was the trigger for setting up Jeevan. That was in 1985. All went well and then around 2005 we started supporting a lot of children with thalassemia.
And we knew at that time that thalassemia is a disease which is curable. A child which is receiving a blood transfusion every three weeks, four weeks for lifelong.
Almost all of them succumb when they reach the team either due to the disease or due to the complications of transfusion. Outside India 60 to 80% of people with similar diseases are leading a normal life after.
In those days it used to be called a bone marrow transplant. Today we call it a system cell transplant. The reason is very simple.
In India our ethnicity is completely different from what the Caucasian is. Even today with 40 million people registered as potential donors, the chances of an Indian finding a match is possibly less than a perfect match is less than 10%.
Simply because India does not have a large registry. That is something that is the unfulfilled dream for me at this point. Before I leave I would like to see a reasonable sized registry which could help a good number of children find a cure.
We have several hundred transplant facilities set up. It is like having mega kitchens without vegetables and rice in the toast. That is exactly the situation right now.
I just want to take you back to the early days of Jeevan. When you had so many challenges in front of you. I am not even talking of the financial bit. People not being aware of the amount of tests that had to be done to ensure that there is no contamination of the blood.
There is no amaranth branche.
Exactly. There is proper storage. You are up against a mountain in every single aspect. So how did you take it? What is the first set of things you did?
The very first thing when we decided to move into this and doing it, we are aware of the challenges. We knew there is only one challenge which is financial.
Because we know how to test. We have been running the laboratory for 10 years. We know the infrastructure. We know how to test. We had access to equipments which are needed to do it.
But the problem was purely financial. That is one part of the story as far as operations. But the most important thing is when the whole world has moved into what is called the blood component therapy. Except in a situation where there is a rapid blood loss even today.
Whole blood is never used. Either someone with let us say a dengue platelet count is low, they need only the platelets. Someone who is anemic, who is going through an elective surgery will possibly need only the red cells.
Single unit of blood can be split into minimum of three components. So when we started on 24th September 1985, we took a stand. We will not provide whole blood. We will just get this whole transfusion medicine specialty. There was no specialty at that time. It was an over the counter situation.
So we said we will move them slowly towards using blood components so that the blood can be optimally used to more number of people who need it.
What was the discussion? Sorry, I am just holding you back because I am trying to go a little deeper. What were the kind of conversations you had with doctors to convert them? Because they said I want whole blood. How would you convince them to use components?
We had to. We really had to struggle. Simply to say that good old days we didn't have milk in the sachet and sort of a thing. We used to have cows coming in front of the house, cows with buffaloes and then milking it. You get the milk warm. That is how people wanted blood in early mid 80s.
They wanted the blood to be collected simply like Amaragbhar and Tenu story and it needs to be collected at the side of the theatre, operational theatre. Now that comes to the question of testing that needs to be done.
So there were compromises. That is probably the reason why we were seeing those results which made us get into this blood banking scenario.
There was a lot of issues with reference to the blood safety and we were able to think it is an uphill task. We did succeed. It took us a few years. People slowly changed.
I am extremely happy that today, though sadly in 2017, we had to pull the curtains on blood bank operations simply because it was bleeding us. We couldn't sustain the blood bank with the reason that you said the amount of tests that needs to be done which was far more than what is being practiced in every blood bank in Chennai.
And naturally it cost more. It is a not for profit. The cost needs to be reimbursed, compensated with donations which is not happening the way that we are expecting. So 21 years, we finally had to pull the shutters. It is sad. But 350,000 units of safe blood had been given and we are happy for that. Even today we are making people remember.
And I think you basically changed the entire landscape for blood storage, donation, all of that. Policy Gazette came as a result of all the work that you did.
Exactly. In fact, that is another very interesting thing. It is not an original idea. When I was in UK travelling, conferences, something I do, the entire UK had just four blood centers. In our language we call it blood banks.
Centralized, huge operations and the tested blood is distributed to the hospitals. They were stored there. Last mile tests like compatibility matching and all those things were done in the hospital.
That means they were able to ensure the quality, their processes are uniform. So we said why can't we do it? We had 2200 blood banks in our country which are collecting from 10 units in a month to 1000 units a month.
We started explaining this to several governments and whichever political party it was. But it didn't go anywhere until one gentleman came and sat in a seat which looked like an accidental posting.
And went back to him to explain the whole thing and he asked what is the problem in this? I said we don't know. It is not moving.
He said to come back and called everybody for a meeting at 3 o'clock that evening. I went out to the JIO permitting us to start the first official blood storage center in a hospital which is Sundaram Medical Foundation.
So we were providing the tested blood, blood components rather, to the hospital which will store and subsequently in 2001 it became a policy. Now we have several thousand blood storage centers in the country.
I am glad my colleagues and Jeevan could play a role in that. And not only play a role, I think you played a pivotal part in ensuring that the quality of blood in India got to a different standard altogether.
So many presentations you made, things were not moving. It just required that one person sitting there in the right place at the right time.
For some reason he was transferred the next week. Don't ask me why.
Anyway, this got done.
Okay. Now the other side. How did you convince people to donate? You have told me this in the past. During drives when you have, you suddenly get a lot of blood and then there are patches when you don't get blood.
So it's not part of the culture. Sometimes I wonder if not enough was done on communication by Jeevan because that would have been an uphill task.
You know, unfortunately the situation that you are explaining continues even today in 2023.
The next three months there is going to be difficulty in getting blood for patients because educational institutions will be closed. That is one.
The second thing is I think the whole problem is precipitated by bad planning and logistics.
Chennai still doesn't have a central blood bank. Though the talk has been there repeatedly like the tornadoes coming and going.
Unfortunately, we don't see much. Nothing has happened. All that we need is sort of a centralized system to channel it.
Blood banks facilities are existing in Chennai, Jeevan being out. And I know what struggles they are going on to sort of sustain themselves.
There are a lot needs to be done, can be easily done. And if only somebody has the will to sit down and discuss and put the central blood bank in Chennai in place, which can be easily replicated elsewhere.
The model exists. The UK has been having it for decades, like you said.
It's not just UK. Every country you look over left, right and think it's having it. Thailand has got, despite the HIV, one of the safest blood transfusion facility is in Thailand.
And the other thing is South Africa, which came from high HIV mid 90s to almost the safest blood in the whole world today. They could transform. Then why can't we do that?
Sometimes you wonder that crisis is what ensures that things finally move. There was so much of a problem with the general population getting affected that measures had to be taken.
No, the lethargy of people have to be blamed. If you need to benefit from something, you need to participate in that.
I'm sure you'd have had a call several times. I've received even last week I had a call from someone unknown said that we need four units of blood. Can you tell me where I can get donors?
I said this is for whom? He said it's for my brother. How many of you are siblings? He said four of us. How many of you have offered to donate blood? Silence.
That is the situation. And everybody thinks that only if it hurts them, then they need to step up. I think the society has to be equally blamed or blamed more for the situation in the blood transfusion system.
That's everything. Customs, beliefs, supply and distribution. Though you've come a long way and you did so much for it in the 20-21 years that Jeevan was in existence. It's like a battle. Where did you find the resources to, mental resources to keep going?
See, at the end of the day, if another 20-30 patients receive blood, I think that's the one which keep us going, fighting the battle the next day.
Even today I had a call asking whether we have stock of red cells. This morning. So I had to tell them, sorry, blood bank is no longer functional.
That isn't surprising. Your name is synonymous with Jeevan.
Jeevan very much exists, but we are doing something totally different. It's a metamorphosis which has happened in around 2005-2007.
Okay. What is the next stage?
So I was just telling about the difference between a child with thalassemia in India and outside India. And we realized that if these children have to live, we need to have a large stem cell donor registry.
Just imagine for a minute as we talk. Today there is going to be 100 or 200 children will be dying with thalassemia. This is going to happen every day.
This is going to continue to happen into 2023, 2024, 2025, simply because we have not succeeded in getting a large regional or a large national registry like it exists in other countries, including Sri Lanka, Singapore, Thailand.
We need people to register people in the age group of 18 to 45 years, which is the biggest numbers as far as the whole world is concerned. More than 50% of population fall into that age group.
All that India needs is a million people registered, typed and the database ready. We have everything again. We have developed the IT, we developed the infrastructure.
We currently have about 20,000 people registered. But what is preventing us in creating that registry is something which is highly troubling.
If something has to happen to someone, like you said, then probably this country will wake up. Until then, what I am suggesting that we should be doing is for our children and our grandchildren.
Here is a curable disease. We are letting these children die. We can change it if you work together and create a large registry, which is not at all difficult.
That is really the tragic part that it is not difficult and it's not among the most expensive things to do.
It should be a budget of a million people. It should be a budget of something like about 400 to 500 crores over let's say 5 to 10 years. I am not even saying it can be done in 2 years.
This is not a big money for a country with a budget of so many lakh crores which is being done.
Unfortunately, when you talk about making India and all those things, this has to be made only in India. It cannot be made somewhere else, the registry brought here. Our DNA is different.
If we need to have these children have to have a quick and also easy access and affordable access. Today, I was told that I have blood cancer. I need to look for a donor and look at the 4 crore, 40 million database.
My chances of finding is probably 10-15%. But even if I find one, I am lucky. It's going to cost me 45,000 US dollars to get that single unit from wherever it is to my hospital for my treatment.
I cannot afford it. I am sure you cannot afford it. I am not taking the transplant cost into that. But you know how much actually it costs? This is like blood again. Somebody is donating.
There is a cost involved in the whole process. The testing, finding out the donor being fit and then donor going through a process, test and then collecting it and delivering it to the hospital.
It should never cost more than possibly 3 to 3.5 lakhs in a worst case scenario. So, it is possible to deliver if you have a large registry under 3 lakhs, what is required for a child to get well, normal and then continue with life.
I don't know what they are going to invent and what they are going to give it with their native intelligence.
500-600 crores is what? Today, 8000 crores is a billion?
Forget it. We are talking 50 crores a year is the budget.
I mean, it is staggeringly miniscule or does it require? You spent what 30 years, 35 years battling this, right? You know so much more about what is involved and what needs to be done and yet it is like it just doesn't seem to move.
And what you are saying is the costs are literally, today you have start-ups getting that kind of money in a one round and two rounds.
If I can tell the, I want several people asking whether we can invest money. I said it amounts to blood money. I don't want it in my hands.
Yeah, because once you do it, it then gets into that other level. So, what I am wondering is how did you maintain? Now, it is one thing to do a job. For most of us, our challenges are relatively simple.
Will I get a promotion next year? Will I buy that house? And then you opt to do something like this. Why would you bother? But then we are so grateful that there are people like you who do these things because that is what makes the rest of the world liveable.
I am standing on the shoulder of few hundreds of my own past, present colleagues. If they are not so dedicated, some most of them are with me for 20 years, 25 years, 30 years.
It is their dedication and equally the support of my family and their families in understanding what we are doing with the hope that there will be someone who will even help Jeevan adding 10,000 donors a year, which probably will be, we are talking about five throws a year.
So, I am saying one Jeevan is not enough. BDQ registry is not enough. Probably we need four regional registries which need to become a consortium at national level. The proposals are all sitting in the health ministry's table for the last 10 years. How it can be done? Let's hope that it happens.
Wonderful. There have been several well-wishers and a whole lot of support that you have got from people along your journey. At certain points you wonder why projects like these which are so truly required, you went into biometric. If you had codified the entire set of what is the blood group that the person belongs to.
You know, it is very easy to create a database but databases doesn't save lives. I was reminded of one of the film, the central thing about the database and which temple gives what food and what time and what days. It is a question of application of the database which is more important than creating a database.
So, the mindset of people have to change that can be only done through constant education. I honestly believe the media has lot more to play and unfortunately that is not happening. The public service announcements which are the PSAs which were there in those years.
We had had people like Anil Kumbhle, Rahul Dravid and all those people coming on and doing what the bit. It is all available still on the YouTube. Any blood bank want to use it if it is not for profit they can do it. We have great creators. Sharad Akshar you must play a large role in Jeevan's campaigns in the good old days. And I know at some point of time you contributed a thing.
It was very smart. No, no, no. It is not a thing. We ask people what they can do. We don't ask some people money. We go and ask somebody that if you are in the thing why don't you help us to do this and that thing. We ask billboard people in those days that between changing billboards they will put up a Vinay.
I still remember Sampath. So between the thing this donate blood, blood should circulate is one in the Gemini. We said blood should circulate. That was century advertising. We go and ask people and they were all part of it. But at some point of it still vitamin M is required to keep running. That's where we fell short.
That's the point you problem is exactly the opposite when it comes to products that need to be distributed far and wide. They'll reach the remotest corners of the country and yet something which is so essential. We don't have the means or the system to get this going. Even though it is so essential.
They think if you pay money you can get blood. But that's not the case. How little people know about what are the complications or what is their actual blood group and is it negative positive. I don't know if it's too many things to think about or it gets relegated to the background because it's not an immediate priority. If things are going on. Okay.
Ignorance is bliss. Yes. Absolutely. What is the next level of change central blood bank is one one. I'll take it in two pillars. The one pillar is stencil donor registry for people in the age group of 18 to 45 to come up and register. Once they register this three ml of blood is taken to determine the HLA type and it's in the database.
And if there is a match then only they will most of them won't be even called during their lifetime. But the question is that change committed if you are a match you need to move forward to donate. But that is where across the world and India is no different.
When there is a child that they say 10 children have 10 different people are match. If you go back to these people who registered one year back five year back 10 year back almost six out of 10 will not donate knowing pretty well those six children are going to die. It is a fact.
Even today it is a global problem and India is not different in India. Our experience is that it is not in almost let's say out of the six five four would like to donate but the parents will not allow them which are son or daughter.
So that essentially means we need to educate the society that needs to be a larger agenda the larger effort put in to sort of change the mindset of this is as far as the registry is concerned the blood bank is concerned. What we today need is honestly any blood bank which collects less than 300 blood donations a month which amounts to over 80 percent of licensed blood banks in this country cannot deliver blood safety because it is not viable.
All these things that needs to be centralized blood banks or regional blood banks and then we'll have satellite blood storage centers somebody might turn around say that it's existing. So there is a compelling need for a central blood bank and distributed blood product like any other.
There is a manufacturing logistic cold chain and distribution. So I think these are the two things which I would like to see in terms of education. I think it's a very very deep rooted problem because donation of corneas because they went very heavily on.
I should have I came up with those and that was a consistent thing and maybe it was the celebrity got through but the point is you can't afford to drop off especially in today's world it needs somebody who's sort of absolutely passionate about doing this day in and day out.
If you have to change minds because it's a very very slow process even the person is willing the parents may not be willing. It's a daunting task if you are able to play for 10 second videos in the IP in between the IPL or something like that telling repeatedly the same thing again and again and again and again.
End of the evening you get convinced that this is good. I was just seeing someone talking about health drink which now added one more thing of saying that it gives you immunity. People are spending crores and thousands of crores to buy that product and drink.
So end of the day all that I learnt about that particular article and video that I saw is that you need to tell the story right. There are people at the other end to take it. So that exactly the convincing stories have to come with reference to blood donation and stencil donation.
Because it's a societal change there are attitudes and there are codes within embedded deep within. The problem is we have all these overlaps. We have several things that are spoken about which affect how we see this. Organ donation is another thing which they're fighting battles on all fronts on that.
Talking of organ donation I think one more thing on the organ donation side that needs to be done is the kids and the relatives who need to be educated more than the person who donates sign up. Because after he is gone they are the people either they are allowing the donation or stopping the donation.
That I mean education has to shift from after the registration I think it should go to the family. Recently I think based on this exactly what you're saying though the person had made up his mind his mother had said that she wanted to give her body weight to the hospital.
And then the problem was that they had not done the registration earlier. The word from relatives who felt that if you don't have a body how can you do the rituals. So then there are so many layers of this that ties into belief that ties into afterlife.
I agree with you. I'm sure you've heard this in some form or the other. No the other side is also I have seen at least a couple of my friends parents who wanted to donate to for the anatomy department and they succeeded. So the positive side of respecting what the person who died wanted it has happened.
But in a lot of things yes rituals take priority over somebody's wish. I don't think we have a clear answer for that at this stage. Unfortunately the person who wanted to donate cannot get up and say shut up I wanted my body to be given to the anatomy department for dissection so it's not going to happen.
There are no easy answers. It involves tackling it at so many levels. It's not just about telling people that you need to donate blood because that is easy to say but to actually make it happen and very practical aspect 80% of blood banks don't collect more than 300 units is surprising. That too in a city which has what 9 million people.
Not at all difficult. See if you look at how what's the number of people who are eligible to vote. People who are eligible to vote are eligible to donate. That is the truth. It's education, education, drilling the fact, changing the attitude. I think it can be done only with the good media program. There is no other way that this can be changed.
Yeah it needs tackling at several levels. You've spent your entire lifetime trying to change minds, trying to change policy, trying to ensure that the blood that is distributed to the people who desperately need it is something that preserves life gets them back to health.
At one point of time I felt this happened in Serengeti. In one of those trips I was just looking through the lens and suddenly it dawned on me what a tunnel vision that I have. I've just isolated everything else which is in front of me and I'm just looking through a tube into a very small portion of the place.
The whole thing. So I folded the whole thing, kept it aside and the next few hours I did not take my camera out. I just what I eyes could see are just registering. That was the time it dawned. It's time for me to move out of from the long lenses to start looking at things in a wider perspective.
The moment you become wider it becomes wildscapes and landscapes and that's how. But most importantly you showed one picture which was my first trek into Annapurna base camp. I fell in love with the mountains, the Himalaya. The moment I saw what was unfolding in front of me in 2006.
I made probably close to 15 or 16 trips to the Himalaya in different regions and different temperatures at minus 40 climbing 15,000 feet at minus 10. So it's an amazing experience and of course again as a team I couldn't have done alone unless I had the trust my trusted friend Rahul with me in every single episode.
He knew the mountains like the back of his hand he is a mountaineer. So that was fantastic. He was there so I was willing to give surrender my life and follow what he said to get the best image that's possible. Bottom line here is that follow the passion, be creative and that should be add on to whatever you're doing that gives you the bread butter and jam. Learn a hobby. I think that's the that's the parting message.
You know if there are people out here who are listening or who will watch the show at some point in time if they wanted to get into taking the work you've already done forward. The most important thing is educating people. Education can come through only communication. So if you're strong in communicating whether you're an amateur or professional whatever it is if you have ideas in communicating I'll be only too happy to interact with them. I can be reached at Srinivasan at jeevan.org.
Let's understand only by working together we have to solve a problem which is going to hit all of us at some day or other or somebody known to us or close to us. I think only we need to solve this problem. So let's put our heads together whatever way each one could contribute. Doctors will do their job. They will do the transplants if the match is there. I think we need to do create this sort of the larger finances one funds are required. So there are several ways it can be done and we can always discuss.
So social media needs a blood donation influencer. That slot is open. And stencil donation. People who have been donating platelets. There are people who donate platelets regularly. I would urge them to come ahead and register. You go through the website bethecure.in.
You have all the information available there. Just drop us a mail and then we'll start communicating how we can take this wonderful doctor. It's a life lived with purpose with so many goals attained so much more to be done. But I think what I see right through is a consistent thread. And I think your life is really a wonderful example of how it requires dedication of not just one or two years but a lifetime to bring about real change. And for a lot of people who believe that change will happen if I just put it in the
two or three years into it. You're a clear example of how much needs to be done. All these things would not have happened if my first job was different. Looking back the first job made all these things happen. I'm eternally thankful for what happened at that time in the first job. So still going with the title. I think the first job is responsible for where I am today and where blood safety and bone marrow transplant is today. I think thank you very much. Thanks to everyone who has been there.
Thank you for taking the path and thanks Renu for having me on this show.
It's been a pleasure and an honor like I said Dr. Srinivasan. And if we've been able to reach a few more people on this wonderful journey of yours, I think this is one of the fulfillments that we'll make.
Thank you. Jai Hind.
That was Dr. Srinivasan and he has really dedicated his entire life to this one mission. And if we had a few more people who will take up the baton from here, I think the potential for change is enormous. As we've seen, there's a whole lot of work that still needs to be done. And the younger generation who believe that this is possible.
Thank you for watching and please do subscribe.
Thank you.