Doc Udwadia catches his hero’s pulse and writes a one-man play
A soliloquy, written by famed city doctor, will be staged at the NCPA on July 10
Dhamini Ratnam
MUMBAI: The city’s most famous doctor and an ardent evangelist for the art of healing Dr Farokh Udwadia would like us to model ourselves on the life of Dr Albert Schweitzer (1875 – 1965), a doctor of tropical medicine who spent his life treating the ill, residing close to the jungles of French Equatorial Africa, in Lambaréné, Gabon, and whose name even today conjures up images of selflessness and sacrifice for the betterment of humanity.
“He was a man worthy of being copied, or if not completely copied, then at least people should change after learning about what Schweitzer was like,” Dr Udwadia said in the course of a telephonic interview. We are talking to Dr Udwadia about Schweitzer, cut in mould of a Renaissance man—by age 30 he had received three doctorates in philosophy, music and theology—because the good doctor at the grand old age of 92 has written a one-man play on the life of his hero. The play, featuring Jim Sarbh and directed by Sooni Taraporewala, will be staged at the
NCPA on July 10.
“I always wanted to write a play,” said Dr Udwadia, who has authored several books including Tabiyat: Medicine and Healing in India and other essays (2018) and The Rise, Decline and Fall of the Achaemenid Empire (2009), but had never tried his hand at playwriting until now. When Covid struck, Dr Udwadia isolating in his Malabar Hill home decided to write the play which is structured as a soliloquy in three acts.
Dr Udwadia say it took him 5 months and multiple drafts before he was satisfied — editing and revising the play through the initial chaotic months of the pandemic. “I wrote the third act first, and it was the fastest—all of a day in fact,” he said because he knew Schweitzer’s philosophy inside out, and agreed with much of it.
In his autobiography, Out of My Life and Thoughts, Schweitzer described his philosophy as that in which “union with the Infinite [could] be realized by ethical action.”
In the soliloquy, Dr Udwadia showed how Schweitzer came to it. The idea, he said, emerged from a central question that “tore Schweitzer up internally”. “What is the relationship between the march of civilisation and universal ethics? What is the link that connects the two? Mind you, he was a doctor of philosophy, but he couldn’t find this link in anything that he read. Suddenly, unknowingly, there flashed into his mind this phrase, reverence for life. This, he realised, was the link he had been searching for,” Dr Udwadia explained.
Born in 1875 in Kaysersberg (Alsace-lorraine), Germany, (now Haut-rhin, France), only two months after Germany annexed that province from France, Schweitzer was a skilled organist, and gave recitals around Europe.
“In 1905, Albert Schweitzer decided to take up a call from the Society of Evangelist Missions of Paris to become a physician and help them advance their cause and work. The following year, 1906, (and despite pleas from his family to pursue his religious studies) 31-year-old Albert began medical school. He received his M.D. in 1913 with specialization qualifications in tropical medicine and surgery,” wrote Dr Howard Markel, a columnist for PBS Newshour, on Schweitzer’s 141st birth anniversary.
At age 38, he moved to Africa with his wife, Helene, and eventually established a small hospital close to the mouth of the Ogooué River at Port Gentil (now Cape Lopez). It was while journeying on this river that the concept, reverence for life —
Schweitzer’s main philosophical “thought discovery” — came to him. The effect of Schweitzer’s own ethical imperative was visible to all: He was given the honorific, Oganga (a practitioner of medicine), by the people of Lambaréné. The hospital grew, and was supported largely by volunteer work. “At the time of Dr Schweitzer’s death, at age 90 in 1965, the compound comprised 70 buildings, 350 beds and a leper colony for 200,” Markel wrote.
Schweitzer, together with other Nobel Prize winners and other leading intellectuals of his time, also firmly stood against nuclear warfare.
“He believed in universal love, and universal compassion. And he lived a life which was truly wonderful. In our world today, where we run after power and pelf, this is a model of a life which should be copied,” Dr Udwadia said. Like Schweitzer, Udwadia too is a passionate believer in the power of music to heal and in his 2004 convocation address at the Banaras Hindu University he had included charity among the hallmarks of a great physician along with competence, humanity, honesty and integrity.