INDEFATIGABLE SPIRIT: For six months each year Dicksheet works for Indian kids

Sharadkumar Dicksheet is more than just a regular avuncular doctor. Not because the magazine NRI World and Merril Lynch chose him as the NRI of the Year for 2001. Nor for the fact that he is a five-time Nobel peace prize nominee. He performs reconstructive surgery on poor Indian children is but a small reason for the awe he commands. What renders the 71-year-old, Brooklyn-based surgeon extraordinary is that he has accomplished all that despite his ailing health: Dicksheet mostly relies on a wheelchair, is dependent on a voice box and only 20 per cent of his heart muscles function.

However, fighting paralysis, cancer of the larynx and two heart attacks, Dicksheet continues in dogged persuasion of his goal: performing free facial reconstruction on poor children as part of the India Project he founded 35 years ago. The surgeon spends six months a year in India aided by a team of volunteers, doctors and nurses from the US, local hospitals and organisations.

Growing up in Wardha-he was one of six children of a postmaster-Dicksheet was moved by the cruel treatment meted out to deformed children. "I used to watch children with cleft lips and other deformities being tortured and teased by their peers. They were called untouchables and evil," recalls Dicksheet. "My mother used to tell me stories about how parents drowned or abandoned their children." In India, one in every 500 babies is born with a congenital defect, the highest number in the world. Infants born with cleft lips and palates are unable to nurse, drink or eat normally and usually starve to death. That is, until a corrective surgery is performed. That was when Dicksheet resolved to help such children. "I decided that when I grow up I will become a doctor," he says.

So in 1958, he reached the shores of the US and began his practice at Fairbanks, Alaska. Today he has become legendary for performing almost 40 operations daily: six patients lie anesthetised in an operating room while he works through the lineup, helped by aides, without taking a break.

"I will do this until the day god calls me home. It is in His honour that I do the plastic and reconstructive surgeries and this is what drives me to help as many children as I can while I am here on this earth," says Dicksheet, who is separated from his wife. The couple has a daughter Supriya, a pre-medical student. "Children are a gift from god, I help children, thereby I serve God," says Dicksheet.