Article Review

“The Medicine for Grief” is the title of the article picked up from a Reader’s
Digest of the month of May, year 2008 and is published under the section named
“My Story (personal stories beyond the call of daily life)” and is written by Tan
Poh Tin a Malaysian lady doctor who volunteers herself for medical missions and
relief work in different countries. This article describes her stay at some remote
area of Afghanistan during the year 2002 in the troubled times when the Taliban
reign had ended and the country had been reduced to no more than heaps of rubble,
she describes what the people really needed as medication for the wounds inflicted
on them during the ten years of terrorism.
This article was selected after going through a number of articles because it attracts
the reader by illustrating the grief of a person through real examples and bounds
the reader in a cocoon of rising emotions. The author has described a number of
incidents to convey her message about those who had lost their family and the
loved ones due to the growing menace of terrorism. She describes that how
adversely it has affected the pattern of their social, cultural, economic life.
The writer displays a small picture in the article without any note or title; however
the picture shows her attending a baby patient in a remote set up medical camp
which further strengthens the belief of the reader in the described incidents about
the calamity stricken country.
The main body of the article comprises as described above the different threats and
incidents the Afghan people faced, like terrorism, shortage of food, lack of medical
facilities and education. Example, one of the lady patients the author treated at her
camp had lost her husband; also she was a university graduate and was forced to
stop working during the Taliban regime, another woman had lost her child due to
the lack of medical facilities. People were trying to flee the country due to the day
by day growing problems, death rate was increasing and the graves were emerging
with such a momentum that at some places they outnumbered the people living in
that area.
When we compare the situation described in the article with our country it leaves
us with the assumption that we might be heading towards the same situation which
will leave our country calamity stricken, because the incidents happening indicate
that terrorism is prevailing, disease is increasing and economy is failing. Pray it
never happens.
The end of the article is rather open and certainly we can add our own assumptions
and results to it. The idea the author wants to give us through the article/story is the
true nature of pain and grief, not only among the valiant Afghans but the people
living all over, along with its remedy. The remedy about which the author
considers is hope and flexibility under the prevailing circumstances because they
are a person’s best weapon against despair and darkness for they have never failed
him. Take the example of Japan, the country was reduced to ashes, people dead,
industry destroyed and economy failed but the thing that kept them going was their
hope and it didn’t failed them, today they are prosperous and own one of the best
industries across the globe. So, we must have hope and faith to achieve the best we
could forge for ourselves.