[Applause] [Music] [Laughter] [Music] day they madur one of the oldest cities in South India at the heart of the city is a temple built more than 2,500 years ago dedicated to the godess minakshi fishey consort of Lord Shiva [Music] Legend has it that Lord Shiva himself performed 64 Miracles here in Mad is a place called AR [Music] Dr goind paven Swami was 58 when he founded arind when it first started the hospital had 11 beds its mission was the eradication of needless blindness today it is the largest and most productive Eye Care Facility in the world [Music] I Dr W Swami you see I been in in the field of iare for the last 50 years now early days of [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] gayaka worked the fields before losing his sight 10 years ago he now lives with his daughter in a house he never finished building Sun moved in with her daughter after blindness set in she tries to on water weeks at a time so as not to be a burden to her family you know in a in a way uh blindness is uh is a fatal disease in India uh the life expectancy after blindness is 2 and a half or 3 years if you can't feed yourself and your family then there a there a bad expression in India which is a blind person is someone who is M mouth but no hands [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] for [Music] cataract the clouding of the eyes lens is the leading cause of blindness in the developing World while a simple operation can restore sight access to treatment can be difficult perhaps no one understood this better than a man known to many as Dr V Dr V was um uh dedicated the proposition that had to reach out into the villages and if there's any anyone in the world who really understood the core necessities of social marketing I think before the term was invented uh he was the person see McDonald's concept is simple they feel they can train people all over the world irrespective of different religions different culture and all those things to produce a product in the same way and Del it in the same manner in hundreds of places he kept talking about McDonald's and hamburgers and none of it made any sense to us he wanted to create a franchise a a a mechanism of delivery of eye care with the efficiency of McDonald's supposing I'm able to produce I care techniques methods and all those things the same way and make it available in every corner of the world the problem of blindness is gone there are now five arai hospitals in South [Music] India they are all self-sustaining and together they see over 1.4 million patients and perform over 200,000 site restoring surgeries each year 2/3 of it services are [Music] free all the Aran hospitals have free and paying sections patients decide where they want to be treated while choice of accommodation varies between the two sections the quality of treatment does not hey super boy at Aran every patient who can pay covers costs for two who cannot because of their High numbers the revenue from paying patients not only covers cost for Aran free services but also generates a surplus that funds all growth and expansion and I don't insist upon that that man must pay me before I do anything for him I said give you the sight man let him give whatever he can give if he has cannot afford doesn't matter he can give later so priority is for human welfare all the hospitals send Medical Teams into the villages patients requiring surgery are brought back to the base hospital where they receive Food lodging treatment and return transport completely free of charge close to 50% of all the patients Out ofin treats are sought out and brought back to the hospital through these screen eye camps so the the typical problems that a patient has is how do we get to the hospital someone has to come with me it's going to cost me a lot of money uh other person doesn't want to come because he can't take the time off so all of these barriers are taken care of [Music] a [Music] [Music] a [Music] [Music] [Music] over the years we built up a huge network of community organization that support us and now each year we organize 1,500 screening eye camps which translates to roughly 30 to 40 screening camps every week Dr V's involvement with the community began long before the start of arind see when I started the I camps in 1961 the government wanted us to reach The Villages the leaders in the community also saw this one and they were thrilled and they said we will come and help you also so it became a s of people's moment in our early days Gandhi g was all in all for us his simple life his truthfulness and he said spiritual life progress can be made in the life not going to a monastery or going to Asam during his years of government service Dr V met Sir John Wilson a blind man of great vision and founder of the royal Commonwealth Society for the blind in my life I think he did a lot of work to Mentor me lots of times I felt I was not coming up to his expectations being brought up in a Colonial Country you are all the time looked down upon used to pull me up constantly come and we will go and see the prime minister or we will go and see this uh wh meeting something that he used to call me he will take me he will say I will show you down blind man decided down with his help a center was set up the drastically reduced childhood blindness due to nutritional deficiencies the two men also launched a Nationwide iamp program that took hundreds of Mobile Medical units right to the doorstep of the [Music] blind in in our system we operate each day between 600 to 1,000 patients and we need to do that for us to be to remain efficient and the whole systems are geared around doing that and this doesn't happen accidentally Dr V said Administration is essential and two of the qualities that he brought to the Arvin model were the necessity of good Administration and a conviction that systems could substitute for a richness in available Human Resources the paramedical team at Udin forms the backbone of the system these young women are recruited from Villages around madur and are trained in refraction testing Warden theater Duty cing and housekeeping they had so much of respect to the patient and they were willing to do any type of work for the patient and they were also willing to share with us in the dream of the hospital that is how our program started so from 1976 onwards till today every year we take about 100 girls from the village four highly trained paramedics assist each doctor thus optimizing the surgeon's time and skill in this way a doctor at arind averages over 2,000 surgeries a year against a national average of 220 doctors are not paid extra because they doing more operation but the other way it helps also our is a teaching institution the more patients are there the better the training can be well my name is Michael obber and I was in aravan January of 2003 and uh I was there as a resident the Physicians there were incredible they were fantastic surgeons they gave incredible patient care and their priorities could serve as a model to every physician in the United States I'd say one of the more interesting Parts was how medications and things that we take for granted pieces of equipment are not available the Ingenuity and the fact that they're manufactured at aavan was very impressive this is the intraocular lens production facility which we started in 1992 with support from foundation in us this is the inocular lens which we produce here and this lens serves as a substitute lens once we remove the natural cataract lens from the eye early '90s there were no higho manufacturers in India we had to import lenses from the West at that time each lens was costing around $200 they were not affordable in most developing countries so we devised our own methods of making lenses up to International standards and we were able to sell them at about $5 a piece today we manufacture a wide range of Opthalmic products as well and we are exporting them to over 85 countries around the world here to Nirvana have you read the book it's a it's a it's a like Lonely Planet it's a tour guide but all for Spiritual destinations different ashs and really cool and AR the hospital is on it Dr vinat Swami's pioneering work and his compassionate Spirit have been recognized by a number of honors among them are the podma three award from the government of India the Helen Keller International award which has been presented to him at the United Nations and the time life service award from the international Agency for the prevention of blindness we await with eagerness this first lecture on the theme of rationalism and spiritualism please welcome Dr goapa vinat Swami now it's a very very funny experiment I used to sit with the ordinary Village man because I am from a village what you call a rustic unsophisticated man I [Music] [Applause] in the early days we had no paper pencil slate nothing like that so the only way children could be taught learning was to collect sand and spread it on the floor the fingers we used to write one of the things V children have to do is every house got a buffalo and a pair of Bullocks for forming all those things the boy was asked to take the Buffalo for grazing out so I used to do it early morning 5:00 or 5:00 in the morning mother used to wake me up and get up go and take the [Music] buffal I used to sit with theary Village man because I am from a village and suddenly turned around and then you see s to contact with inner being you seem to be one with him but here is a soul which has got all the Simplicity of confidence doctor whatever you say I accept it an implicit faith in you and then you respond it here is old lady who has got so much of faith in me I must do my best for him now how am I going to train myself to do Perfection orindo talked about the perfectability of the human soul and Dr V embodies it he embodies the perfectability of humanity both in his work on the Perfection of himself and his work on ridding the world of one form of [Music] suffering shindo and the mother were two key spiritual figures of the 20th century Dr V was introduced to their teachings in pondicherry they say there's a lot of energy and in the higher levels of consciousness that Consciousness sees the truth as such mind doesn't see the truth and it can organize things in a better way than what the mind can do what he calls Divine life on [Music] Earth nobody had become a doctor in my Village or in my community also that time do is something very [Music] very I remember vividly when I was have been hardly five four or five years old next door to I heard a shouting and yelling in the early morning and was told that the pregnant woman during delivery died that lady must have been hardly about 20 years and that upsets me a young woman hardly 20 years old suddenly dying away and you don't see her anymore and said can you not do something to prevent it Dr V entered medical school with plans to become an obstetrician in 1944 he joined the army and as a medical [Music] officer 4 years later he was discharged after Contracting a rare form of rheumatoid arthritis a condition that left his fingers permanently crippled barring him from a career in obstetric that is how I got into the a hospital Shear accident and even after joining the hospital walking a few steps was difficult painful holding a pen was difficult and holding surgery was little difficult it took some years for me to pick up surgery Dr B went on to personally perform more than 100,000 successful eye surgeries after I became an eye doctor I started appreciating how good his surgery was in fact he was our teacher in surgery and uh all the instruments he knew how to handle them very elegantly there was no special instruments for him the instruments that we normally use he used to handle them but in a different angle and his surgery used to be so perfect my father died when I was uh 16 because he died Dr W is the eldest man of the family so he took the responsibility of developing all of us so he educated us because of that he didn't want to get married so that he can spend more time with the family I still remember once I went to a movie with my par with my mother an aunt and after coming from the movie I had to write about 10 hours what moral values I learned from that movie and then subsequently I I was not very happy to go for any movies and he says if you were there what will you do to change the movie in order to reach the common people I was hardly 15 and at that age I was not to so happy to answer in 1976 Dr V retired from government service at the mandatory retirement age of 58 he then started a nonprofit trust with his brothers and sisters and in the same year an eye clinic was opened in mad it had 11 beds and was called arind after Shri orindo uh when Dr V started sometimes I have sort of joked that uh he started with the finest group of opthalm in [Music] India what Dr we used to say is get less do more number that was our slogan and nobody will know what it was exactly that time I mean even now you also maybe it will be difficult for you to understand what was the situation that time sometimes I have to pledge the gold jewelry for the family and get money CU I had to pay to the laborers every Saturday so like that in the beginning we had a lot of problem we got Finance so I agreed to mortgage my house and then we borrowed about 200,000 rupees or some like then we are gradually building that new building which you see now when we finished the ground floor we occupied the ground floor and we could keep the patients there operate there then we buil the first floor so as we earned more and more money we added more floors [Music] Dr V's younger brother shavasan with whom he lives he has found the land he has built the buildings he has controlled the costs and I'll bet you I have heard Dr V say a half dozen times without shasan I could not have done this actually always has got a character once we complete one job he will never say anything we have done good job then after 2 months you'll say as you you'll always have way of saying as you say why not you start a hospital in some place he will never say that we will start a hospital as you say or as we all discussed we should start a hospital in that place throughout the time that I have spent with Dr V his vision of what was possible was Way Beyond what was anything reasonable oh I first met Dr Veta Swami in 1978 when he came to Michigan and I was working at that time at the University of Michigan medical school when Dr vetas Swami came to meet me out of his interest in continuing education he remarked that he would someday like to have a center like this one and in the back of my mind I was thinking now wait a minute he has an 11 bed eye clinic in India he's coming to the states and walking around around this 40,000 ft facility saying he wants one just like this how is he ever going to do it and in a matter of years in around 18 years he had done it and established the Lions arvand Institute for Community Opthalmology [Music] this institute helps transfer the Erin model to other eye care programs in India and the rest of the developing World it set itself originally a goal of working with 100 hospitals through the international uh NGO partners and then make and try to try to help each one of them to do maybe 5,000 or more surgeries per year with good quality and a sustainable manner now this is a good model from malavi malavi we have been working with them before going there they were able to do about 440 surgeries in a year 449 in the whole of 98 as a result of the interaction like that one now they are able to do that number in one month today we are working with 150 hospitals and many are doing far beyond the 5,000 that we set and they're touching 10,000 12,000 some are becoming Role Models very much like what arind is in this part of the country and we're using them to propagate this message even further and I think that's something else Dr V has taught me that the way you make things work the best is you you don't hold on to it and say this is all mine and I'm in control of it but you give it away which is what he does You Train everybody every day you coach him guide him play with him and all those things so you can develop him quickly as a top player so you develop a physical stamina mental capacity and a vision this are doctors feel they carry this all their life also as uh we all know opthalmologist are premium in this country we are only 10,000 to 11,000 opthalmologist for a billion population so we have to be much more productive to meet the demands of the people so and arind is pioneered A system that helps us to do high volume work and I think it's a work in progress we have reached probably 450% of what one could do today more than 30 members across three generations of Dr B's family work at Iran [Music] more than 25 years later all the original team members still work [Music] here Dr Nam and Dr naar have taken on the responsibility of heading the organization while Dr V now serves as chairman when the leadership changes the approach may change the approach but the founders vision and mission of reducing the needless blind depending on the circumstances and change which has taken globally and regionally so we have to change we are keeping the same thing [Music] book five Kanto [Music] 2 there is a power within that knows beyond our knowings we are greater than our thoughts and sometimes Earth unveils that Vision here to live to love are signs of infinite things [Music] when you grow in spiritual consciousness we identif ourselves with all that is in the world so there is no exploitation it is ourselves we are helping it is ourselves we are heing [Music] a [Music] now he says beauty is something the soul wants [Music] it whenever you see a man is in contact with his soul then he enjoys a beautiful sky a beautiful tree a beautiful bird suddenly you hear a piece of music oh and then you lose yourself is like that everything seems to open up in a different way [Music] sh [Music] [Music] [Music] sh fore [Music] [Music] [Music] sh [Applause] [Music]