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Japan-based Australian offers to fly parents to see injured Indian student
Tokyo: An Australian
working in Japan has said that he is prepared to pay the airfare from India to
Australia for the parents of a student who was critically injured when stabbed
with a screwdriver at a party in Melbourne last month. Matthew Patrick, who works
in banking in Tokyo, said this gesture should be seen as an expression of goodwill
that was needed to mend the harm done on Indian students so far. He read that
the distraught parents of Shravan Kumar, 25, from Hyderabad, were too poor to
visit him in the Royal Melbourne Hospital where he is in the high dependency unit.
"I think there should be some goodwill shown here and this is just a simple gesture,"
Patrick said from Japan. "I was talking to my best mate, who is Indian, about
it over a drink and it would help show that all Australians are not like that."
He said he was happy to make the donation to help out the family and hoped his
action would prompt a further response from the state or federal governments.
The Age forwarded the contact details of Kumar's cousin Lakshmi Narafimha to Patrick
in Japan. Narafimha said he was delighted with the offer. He said Kumar was in
a poor condition and did not recognise his relatives who were at his bedside.
Kumar's uncle, Srinivasu Therthala, who has travelled to Melbourne from India
said the student's parents and his brother and sister were struggling to come
to terms with what had happened to him in what they believed was one of the safest
countries in the world.
