It saddened me to read a news item about an elderly man going up the stairs at Mumbai's KEM Hospital. He had one leg in plaster, so he sat on the steps and pulled himself up, one step at a time.

Where was he going?

To the orthopaedics department.

Of all the places in the city to find a lift out of service, it had to be the building where people go because their legs are out of service too.

Earlier this year, Maharashtra minister Mangal Prabhat Lodha took an interest in the same hospital. He wanted King Edward out of its name, and the BMC's health committee backed a proposal to call it Kaushalya Eklavya Memorial Hospital.

I imagined the old man looking up from the stairs and asking, "When you take the king down, could you send someone to take me up?"

I thought of him again when I read about the Diwali fires. The deadline for noisy crackers was ten at night, yet residents reported hearing them well past that hour, and into the wee parts of the morning.

And in over five days, Mumbai's fire brigade logged 333 fire calls attributed to fireworks.

"But it's our tradition!" somebody will say, lighting another fuse.

I wonder what he calls it when the rocket lands in his own living room. I suspect he calls the fire brigade.

And when the fire engine comes, nobody asks the driver to respect the religious sentiments of the fellow who lit the rocket. They expect him to get the hose out and do his job, which is precisely what they should have expected of the authorities at ten o'clock.

There's a wonderful convenience to changing a name. You can invite the press, pull a cord and have a photograph of the job being done.

Try inviting the press to watch a lift work.

"Is that all?" they'll ask as the doors open and an elderly man in a wheelchair rolls in, his plastered leg stretched out in front of him. Yes, that's all, and for that man, it means he can go to a hospital for treatment without needing someone to carry him there.

But for the minister, changing a name gave him more publicity and applause!

Across the country, we're asked to applaud governments for the names they give things and the rules they announce. How long are we going to take an announcement as evidence of good intentions when an old man has to haul himself up a staircase because the lift to the orthopaedic department hasn't been working for three months!

The next time a minister or prime minister wants to tell us what he intends to do for the country, I'd like them to meet that patient climbing upstairs, step by step with broken legs.

The despair in that man's eyes tells us where we are heading ...