Skip to main content

Aruna: Paradoxes of Life


Aruna Ramachandra Shanbaug passed away this morning.  She lived 42 years in a bed of King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai.  A brutal rape had rendered her comatose.  The rapist spent seven years in the prison and became a free man.  His victim lived in a vegetative state as a question mark on many things.

The most controversial question her life raised was about the limits and possibilities of euthanasia when Pinki Virani, writer and human rights activist, moved the Supreme Court seeking euthanasia for Aruna in 2011.  Can anyone choose another person’s death however absurd that person’s life may be?  This was the question that the apex court was faced with.  Obviously, the court decided against Virani’s choice.  Yet can we blame Virani for what she did?  She was being compassionate to Aruna.  Compassion and justice need not always be on the same side of morality.  That was one of the paradoxes raised by Aruna’s life.

Aruna’s relatives in her home state of Karnataka had abandoned her a few years after the tragedy befell her.  They were helpless.  Her sister, the only relative who lived in Mumbai, died two years ago.  The doctors and nurses of King Edward Memorial Hospital became Aruna’s guardians, caretakers, people who fought against Virani’s compassion.  Was it love versus compassion?  I guess we cannot dismiss the hospital staff’s attachment to Aruna as mere sympathy.  If we call it love, the next paradox raised by Aruna is: can love and compassion be on opposite sides of human emotions?

What would Aruna say if she had the power to choose her destiny?  Would she choose Virani or the hospital staff?  Whatever her choice, it would have revealed yet another paradox of human nature.  

I salute all of the people concerned here.  Virani for raising the question about the possibilities of discovering the compassionate aspect of euthanasia.  The hospital staff for their tenacious tenderness.  And Aruna herself for her endurance, however passive, however conscious or unconscious it was, for being a profound question mark on many aspects of human life.



Labels:

Comments

  1. Swati SarangiMay 18, 2015 at 1:40 PM

    A very well written article!! It's sad to hear about this tragic end but end is some thing unavoidable and inevitable.. RIP Aruna ( The fighter)..

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 18, 2015 at 6:29 PM

      Ends are inevitable. Yet they leave us with a lot of questions, sometimes at least.

      Delete
  2. Goutami NewsMay 18, 2015 at 5:17 PM

    Oh..life how many faces you have...! Timely write sir.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 18, 2015 at 6:28 PM

      And most of those faces may be valid too, Goutami. That's the paradox.

      Delete
  3. Saru SinghalMay 18, 2015 at 7:02 PM

    What Pinki Virani did was commendable. I feel a bit sad that her family abandoned her. I wonder about the doctor to whom she was engaged. Did he ever visit her? Just wondering...

    Life is cruel to some. Here's a story of brutality and compassion. Sadly, weaved into one.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 18, 2015 at 8:40 PM

      Incidents like this can make us wonder about the various shades of life.

      Delete
  4. Bushra MuzaffarMay 18, 2015 at 8:45 PM

    Very sad story....the saddest part being it's true and someone has lived it. The paradoxes are integral to human existence. These paradoxes perhaps define life, making it beautiful and at times treacherous.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 18, 2015 at 10:12 PM

      Someone lived it for a very long period. Yes, the entire thing fills us with a multitude of feelings and thoughts.

      Delete
  5. Abhijit RayMay 19, 2015 at 9:12 AM

    Please read my take on the issue : "Whose life is it anyway". I think people should have the freedom to leave their body, if the body becomes a failed instrument to communicate with the world. Yes, there are many ethical and moral dilemma, there are legal issues, but what is more important let some one suffer or create system to address dilemmas.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 19, 2015 at 10:33 AM

      I agree with your arguments. I read your blog. But human affairs are made very complex by the emotions. I tried to focus on that paradoxical aspect.

      Delete
  6. UnknownMay 19, 2015 at 5:37 PM

    Very nice Blog Sir.......

    ReplyDelete
  7. Online JournalistMay 19, 2015 at 9:21 PM

    I admire more the hospital staff for their tenacious tenderness....
    Others should learn from them....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 19, 2015 at 9:29 PM

      Of course, they are a great lesson in love, human bonding.

      Delete
  8. Nima DasMay 19, 2015 at 9:46 PM

    Such a sad life! and that guy who had done,Sohan Lala, is happily married and working as a ward boy in a Delhi nursing home.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 19, 2015 at 10:57 PM

      Another paradox! The villains always get on while their victims suffer all sorts of agonies.

      Delete
    2. Nima DasMay 20, 2015 at 1:52 PM

      So true and so sad.

      Delete
  9. Manisha SharmaMay 20, 2015 at 9:36 AM


    Aruna was the Damini before today's Damini. The Hospital High Command had tried to twist the case by making it of robbery instead of rape and also tried to send Aruna away. Hats off to the nursing staff who fought for her and took care of her for so many years; they didn't let one scratch come on her alive yet dead body. We learned nothing from Aruna's case, that is why today we had a Damini.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Tomichan MatheikalMay 20, 2015 at 1:14 PM

      Manisha, if people could really learn the world would have been a Paradise by now. How many yugs passed since Krishna taught his nishkama karma? How many centuries passed since Buddha taught his enlightenment? The nurses in Aruna's hospital are the real lessons for me.

      Delete
    2. Tomichan MatheikalMay 20, 2015 at 1:16 PM

      But I' m incapable of learning from them.

      Delete
  10. UnknownMay 25, 2015 at 9:06 PM

    RIP Aruna

    ReplyDelete
  11. nidhiMay 27, 2015 at 12:43 PM

    very well put

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Indian Knowledge Systems

Shashi Tharoor wrote a massive book back in 2018 to explore the paradoxes that constitute the man called Narendra Modi. Paradoxes dominate present Indian politics. One of them is what’s called the Indian Knowledge Systems (IKS). What constitute the paradox here are two parallel realities: one genuinely valuable, and the other deeply regressive. The contributions of Aryabhata and Brahmagupta to mathematics, Panini to linguistics, Vedanta to philosophy, and Ayurveda to medicine are genuine traditions that may deserve due attention. But there’s a hijacked version of IKS which is a hilariously, if not villainously, political project. Much of what is now packaged as IKS in government documents, school curricula, and propaganda includes mythological claims treated as historical facts, pseudoscience (e.g., Ravana’s Pushpaka Vimana as a real aircraft or Ganesha’s trunk as a product of plastic surgery), astrology replacing astronomy, ritualism replacing reasoning, attempts to invent the r...
17 comments
Read more

The Ugly Duckling

Source: Acting Company A. A. Milne’s one-act play, The Ugly Duckling , acquired a classical status because of the hearty humour used to present a profound theme. The King and the Queen are worried because their daughter Camilla is too ugly to get a suitor. In spite of all the devious strategies employed by the King and his Chancellor, the princess remained unmarried. Camilla was blessed with a unique beauty by her two godmothers but no one could see any beauty in her physical appearance. She has an exquisitely beautiful character. What use is character? The King asks. The play is an answer to that question. Character plays the most crucial role in our moral science books and traditional rhetoric, religious scriptures and homilies. When it comes to practical life, we look for other things such as wealth, social rank, physical looks, and so on. As the King says in this play, “If a girl is beautiful, it is easy to assume that she has, tucked away inside her, an equally beauti...
31 comments
Read more

Waiting for the Mahatma

Book Review I read this book purely by chance. R K Narayan is not a writer whom I would choose for any reason whatever. He is too simple, simplistic. I was at school on Saturday last and I suddenly found myself without anything to do though I was on duty. Some duties are like that: like a traffic policeman’s duty on a road without any traffic! So I went up to the school library and picked up a book which looked clean. It happened to be Waiting for the Mahatma by R K Narayan. A small book of 200 pages which I almost finished reading on the same day. The novel was originally published in 1955, written probably as a tribute to Mahatma Gandhi and India’s struggle for independence. The edition that I read is a later reprint by Penguin Classics. Twenty-year-old Sriram is the protagonist though Gandhi towers above everybody else in the novel just as he did in India of the independence-struggle years. Sriram who lives with his grandmother inherits significant wealth when he turns 20. Hi...
9 comments
Read more

A Government that Spies on Citizens

Illustration by Copilot Designer India has officially decided to keep an eagle eye on its citizens. Modi government has asked all smartphone manufacturers to preinstall a government app, Sanchar Saathi , on every phone in such a way that no citizen can ever uninstall it. The firms have been also ordered to install the app on existing phones too using software-update technology. The stated objective is to strengthen cybersecurity and protect users from fraud. The question is why any government should go out of its way to impose “security” on its citizens. For over a month now, I have been receiving a message every single day from the Government of India’s Telecom Department to install the app on my phone. I wanted to block the sender, but there is no such option. Even that message is an imposition. I don’t trust any government that imposes benefits on me. “ Beneficent beasts of prey ,” Robert Frost would call such governments. When Modi government imposes security on me, I ha...
8 comments
Read more