Aroup Chatterjee | |
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Chatterjee in 2013
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Born |
Ballygunge, Calcutta, India |
June 23, 1958
Occupation | Author, physician |
Home town | London, England |
Spouse(s) | Zelpha Kittler |
Children | 3 |
Aroup Chatterjee (born 23 June 1958) is a British Indian author and physician. He was born in Kolkata (Calcutta), India, and moved to the United Kingdom in 1985. He is the author of the book Mother Teresa: The Untold Story (originally published as Mother Teresa: The Final Verdict), a work which challenges the widespread regard of Mother Teresa as a symbol of philanthropy and selflessness.
Chatterjee's criticism inspired the documentary Hell's Angel that was shown on Channel 4, a British television channel. The documentary was written by a well-known critic of Mother Teresa, Christopher Hitchens, who co-produced it with journalist and filmmaker Tariq Ali. Chatterjee and Hitchens were the two Devil's advocates, or hostile witnesses to Catholic Church procedures for the beatification of Mother Teresa in 2003.
Chatterjee was born in 1958 and raised in the district of Ballygunge, Kolkata (Calcutta), India, moving to the United Kingdom in 1985. In the 1970s and 1980s while studying at Kolkata Medical College he worked part-time for a left-wing political party campaigning against poverty and later worked at a hospital where he regularly treated patients from the oldest and poorest districts of the city as well as refugees from the civil war with what is now Bangladesh. Later while living in the UK he became concerned by the increasingly common portrayal of the widespread destitution and disease in his native Calcutta which stemmed from press reporting of the work of Mother Teresa. At that point he describes his attitude to Mother Teresa as "If anything, I was positively inclined towards her" although he says he never saw any of her nuns in the slums. However it was this image at odds with his own experience as a doctor in Calcutta that caused him to look more closely at her work and reputation.