Skip to main content

Smile Pinki

HBO's Smile Pinki is the kind of movie that leaves you with a smile in your heart. It follows the efforts of a hospital to provide free cleft lip and palate surgery to the poor. One such patient is five year old Pinki, who could have had her radiant smile hidden behind her cleft lip forever. Her life is transformed when Pankaj, a social worker for the hospital, who travels from village to village to find children with cleft lips and palates, meets her father.

The parents worry about what the operation entails and if their children may be safe. A big part of Pankaj's job is to work soothe the anxious parents so they actually bring their children into the hospital. The surgery is beyond a miracle for these families who would have never been able to afford it. The children go from being stigmatized and isolated, to having a real childhood - they return to schools they had dropped out of, work and play like the rest of the kids.

In the developed world and also in the more affluent urban India, treating a child's cleft lip or palate is a routine procedure - these children have not gone through the experience of being afraid to look at their face in the mirror. It is amazing to see what a huge difference such a "small" corrective procedure can make in the lives of those who have woefully little. In an immensely complex world, Pinki's story is one of utter simplicity - it is one where giving a child the gift of a smile is among the best gifts a doctor can possibly give.

Smile Pinki premiers on HBO Wednesday, June 3 at 7pm (ET/PT).Here is a trailer.
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Part Liberated Woman

An expat desi friend and I were discussing what it means to return to India when you have cobbled together a life in a foreign country no matter how flawed and imperfect. We have both spent over a decade outside India and have kids who were born abroad and have spent very little time back home. Returning "home" is something a lot of new immigrants like L and myself think about. We want very much for that to be an option because a full assimilation into our country of domicile is likely never going to happen. L has visited India more often than I have and has a much better pulse on what's going on there. For me the strongest drag force working against my desire to return home is my experience of life as a woman in India. I neither want to live that suffocatingly sheltered existence myself nor subject J to it. The freedom, independence and safety I have had in here in suburban America was not even something I knew I could expect to have in India. I never knew what it felt t
111 comments
Read more

Cheese Making

I never fail to remind J that there is a time and place for everything. It is possibly the line she will remember me by when I am dead and gone given how frequently she hears it. Instead of having her breakfast she will break into a song and dance number from High School Musical well past eight on Monday morning. She will insist that I watch and applaud the performance instead of screaming at her to finish her milk and cereal. Her sense of occasion is seriously lacking but then so is mine. Consider for example, a person walks into the grocery store with the express purpose of buying detergent because they are fresh out of it and laundry is only half way done. However instead of heading straight for detergent, they wander over to the natural foods aisle and go berserk upon finding goat milk on sale for a dollar a gallon. They at once proceed to stock pile so they can turn it to huge quantities home-made feta cheese. That person would be me. It would not concern me in the least that I ha
5 comments
Read more

Under Advisement

Recently a desi dude who is more acquaintance less friend called to check in on me. Those who have read this blog before might know that such calls tend to make me anxious. Depending on how far back we go, there are sets of FAQs that I brace myself to answer. The trick is to be sufficiently evasive without being downright offensive - a fine balancing act given the provocative nature of questions involved. I look at these calls as opportunities for building patience and tolerance both of which I seriously lack. Basically, they are very desirous of finding out how I am doing in my personal and professional life to be sure that they have me correctly categorized and filed for future reference. The major buckets appear to be loser, struggling, average, arrived, superstar and uncategorizable. My goal needless to say, is to be in the last bucket - the unknown, unquantifiable and therefore uninteresting entity. Their aim is to pull me into something more tangible. So anyways, the dude in ques
6 comments
Read more