Kunal Biswas

Kunal Biswas was a man from our community — a neighbour, a familiar face — who in 2025 faced the cruelest cascade of medical crises a human body can endure. What began with a cardiac arrest — a sudden, catastrophic failure of the heart — set off a chain of life-threatening complications that would eventually claim his life.

The cardiac arrest deprived Kunal's brain of oxygen for critical minutes, resulting in Hypoxic-Ischaemic Encephalopathy (HIE) — a devastating form of brain injury that left him profoundly compromised and unable to function independently. The damage triggered severe, medication-resistant seizures that further stressed an already failing system.

His lungs, already struggling, developed a left-sided pleural effusion — a dangerous accumulation of fluid — and a pneumothorax (collapsed lung), which required an intercostal drain (ICD) to prevent suffocation. Unable to breathe on his own, Kunal was placed on mechanical ventilation via a surgical tracheostomy — a last-resort intervention to keep air reaching his lungs.

He was fighting simultaneously on every front that the human body has. His family was fighting a different kind of battle: the battle against mounting hospital bills, medical supplies that cost more than monthly incomes, and an ICU that never paused for finances.

When Youth Forum learned of Kunal's condition, we did what we have always done — we acted. Recognising the enormous financial burden his family was facing, Youth Forum launched an emergency monetary support campaign — reaching out to our donor network, community contacts, and members to raise funds for his ICU and treatment expenses.

ICU care of this complexity is staggeringly expensive. Mechanical ventilators, specialist physician rounds, tracheostomy care, ICD maintenance, anti-seizure medications, and round-the-clock nursing — each of these individually runs into thousands of rupees per day. For a family already stretched beyond their means, the bills were not just daunting; they were existential.

Youth Forum collected and channelled monetary contributions directly to Kunal's family — transparently, urgently, and without administrative overhead. Every rupee raised went toward keeping him in the care he needed, for as long as care could help.

There are no photographs from this campaign. Unlike our other initiatives, this was a deeply personal and private matter — Kunal's dignity and his family's privacy mattered more than documentation. We document his story here not with images, but with words: because he deserves to be remembered, and because the people who helped him deserve to know their generosity was real.

Youth Forum does not publish stories like Kunal's to claim credit for our involvement. We document them to bear witness — to say, on record, that this person existed, that this family struggled, and that a community showed up.

Medical emergencies of this nature are far more common than most people realise. Cardiac arrests, HIE, ventilator dependency — these do not only happen to distant strangers. They happen to neighbours, to people whose faces you recognise at the market, to families living three streets away.

Kunal's story is a reminder that financial barriers to healthcare are often as fatal as the medical condition itself. Youth Forum's medical aid work — from Soumiparna Mitra in 2024 to Kunal Biswas in 2025 — is our answer to that reality: that no one in our community should face a life-or-death medical crisis alone and without support.