June 16: One evening after dinner in 1991, Satish Karekar, then 42, a Mumbai businessman, experienced a dull pain and heaviness in the chest and lightness in the head. When the feeling persisted well into the night, his brother, who's a doctor, whisked him off to hospital. "There, I was diagnosed as having suffered a heart attack, and promptly put on medication," recalled Karekar. Unlike Karekar, many heart attack victims don't get a second chance. About 1.7 million Indian hearts stop beating every year, according to the World Health Organisation (WHO). Cardiovascular disease emerged as India's top killer around the mid-1980s. Since the turn of the century, it is a growing threat. In 2012,...
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