Dear Authors and Readers of Countercurrents,
You may all know Sheshu Babu an author for CC for long time. Most of our old authors may have received at least one thoughtful comment from him. In the early days, he used to read all CC articles and post a thoughtful comment for each article. Then one day, another CC author Emily Spence tracked him down and encouraged him to write. It was found that he was a blind person. He was reading all the articles using a word to speech machine. After a lot of prodding, he started to write articles and poetry. They were mostly on human rights and were a valuable addition to CC’s content spectrum. Then one day he stopped writing.
Here is his author page https://countercurrents.org/author/sheshu-babu/
I enquired about it with him. After a lot of prodding he revealed that he has cancer. He’s right now undergoing Chemotherapy. He writes, “Currently I have mets to Liver as Bone mets have been radiated. The Liver metastasis is responding to FOLFIRI + Bevacizumab which costs 1.2 lakh per chemotherapy including medicines.”
He wrote to me that he is undergoing a lot of financial hardship due to the high cost of treatment.
This is the time for CC family to step up to support Sheshu. He’s a shy man. He lives somewhere in India. His author bio is that “Sheshu Babu is a writer from anywhere and everywhere”. He’s a universal man, who is concerned about everything universal.
Kindly do whatever you can for Sheshu Babu.
Here are his latest medical records here and here
Here are his bank details
Binu Mathew
Editor
Countercurrents.org
Thanks for bringing this to our attention. I recall Seshu Babu commenting on several of my earlier articles. Then he stopped. Now I know why. I shall definitely donate but more importantly, I pray for Nabu’s early and full recovery.
Dear Sheshu Babu,
Read about your valiant, inspirational struggle and the resistance you are offering to the colonic tumour which has chanced to visit you – as it does to millions of inhabitants of planet earth; that you continue to write and enlighten Indian public at large reminds us of Ivan Illich who like you wrote important pieces as he struggled with his tumour in the neck. When pain became unbearable he was advised to take opiates but still continued with his writing.
The fact that you are battling the ailment for so long without as much as sharing it with the larger Countercurrents’ family of authors and readers till July 2021 is a testimony to your sensitivity and selflessness. We are humbled.
One of us – P. S. Sahni – like you would offer comments to articles for a two decade period (1965 to 1985) in English language papers based in Delhi. Sending a comment to an article is much more difficult and painstaking since you have to imbibe the article and then raise any questions/comment on the issue at hand. Doing it day in and day out in a large number of papers, magazines and journals – as you have been doing we know – is a full time job with the added disadvantage of not getting paid. To that extent it is a thankless job. To be visually challenged and getting articles read/heard through a word to speech machine is itself a monumental job.
When the two of us started writing for CC in 2014, we would expectantly wait for a comment from you and you invariably obliged; it injected some confidence in us. One of us, P.S. Sahni writing about his life threatening heart attack and ICU admission wrote in CC: “I would browse through articles in CC and Sheshu Babu’s comments on umpteen articles. This reading brought sanity to my heart which would otherwise at times go berserk into ectopic beats.”
We wonder whether you have ever counted the number of your comments which have got published? For being an avid comment writer you deserve a place in the Guinness Book of Records. Public spiritedness is ingrained in you. In any developed democracy people like you deserve to be offered a public office.
As you continue offering resistance to your ailment – presently through chemo therapy – you may have queries in your mind. Please do not hesitate to send us an email as and when and as often you want.
Permit us to make a small contribution in your fight. Shobha Aggarwal would be soon making an electronic transfer on behalf of both of us totaling Rs. 50,000/- (Rs. Fifty thousand only) in your account – which we would share equally.
In solidarity,
Shobha Aggarwal & P.S. Sahni