Faith, Power, and the Heart
Shirdi Sai Baba, the first incarnation, kept his compound in Maharashtra. Decades later, Sathya Sai Baba claimed to be his reincarnation at the age of thirteen. My friend and loyal distributor, Rajiv Mahajan, followed this newer Sai Baba and helped outfit the hospital by discounting or donating essential surgical devices. Patients were never charged for their procedures. Staff served them with love and respect.
Each visit over a seven-year period revealed the extraordinary reach of a holy man determined to save lives. Isaac Tigrett, founder of the Hard Rock Café, also fell under Sai Baba’s spell. In the BBC documentary The Secret Swami, Tigrett admitted that even if rumors of misconduct held truth, it would not alter his belief in the guru or the good he brought to India’s poor. His massive clean-water initiative alone transformed health outcomes for some of the country’s most vulnerable communities.
India’s layered beliefs and practices could appear bewildering to an outsider, but the impact felt undeniable. As Sai Baba said, “You have it in your power to make your days on Earth a path of flowers instead of a path of thorns.”
For many in India, he did exactly that.
The Shoe and the Surgeon
Carpentier dedicated enormous time, energy, and money to his work in Vietnam, stepping away from a thriving Paris practice to help shape the country’s approach to heart care. When we met months earlier in the USA, he insisted I arrange a proper interview. The moment I mentioned having already interviewed his Spanish rival, Dr. Carlos Duran, a spark lit behind his eyes.
I apologized for not recording anything during the congress—no tape, no prepared questions—and he waved it off, inviting me instead to visit Vietnam and see his work firsthand.
His focus on mitral valve repair guided much of our discussion. I asked about the porcine valve he developed with Edwards and how it compared to the bovine pericardial models promoted years earlier by Shiley and by Mr. Ionescu. The animosity between Ionescu and Carpentier had never been subtle. When I broached a famous story passed around the industry, he didn’t deny it: at a meeting where both men promoted their tissue valves, Ionescu praised calf pericardial tissue. In response, Carpentier removed his shoe, set it on the speaker’s table, and declared that “cow tissue is only good for making shoes.”
He understood showmanship as well as science.
Brigantine Family Home
The ambitious project of building a family home on the Southern New Jersey shore captivated my thinking as my financial standing steadily improved. After those tight PB monetary times ended, and following my success selling the CPHV, introducing the PLC Heart Laser TM opened a door I quickly ran through. A surprise stopover in Brigantine allowed me to evaluate the progress of a home under construction close to Atlantic City (called “America’s Playground” by local enthusiasts). When I realized my mother’s safety came into question, living next to Camden, a Jersey town on the decline, I moved into high gear to start the project. But how can I do this from halfway around the world? Thankfully, my sister JoAnn, a bank clerk, handled money transfers I made from Singapore.
Communicating with a builder introduced by a friend via fax and telephone filled me with enthusiasm and fear. Much could go wrong. Six months earlier, I sat with the architect and builder on a home visit to develop plans. Since my sister, her husband, and a nephew would move in once completed, I decided on a three-story structure with five bedrooms, four baths, and two kitchens (a small one for my mom on the ground floor with the main dining area-kitchen on the second level). Building this structure never left my mind since the divorce. Multiple stops in New Jersey on the way to heart conferences and PLC office visits accomplish my objective. In the back of my mind, I’d most likely return to America, but that could be a decade away.