Fierce pajamas
For Aruna Shanbaug…
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Television has this habit of dumbing down issues of spectacular complexity. I have in mind here the March 7, 2011 verdict of the Supreme Court, on the question of life and death for Aruna Shanbaug. The electronic media has, with characteristic lack of thought, portrayed it as a match between the angels who seek to foster life and merchants who seek to extinguish it with death.
There is chatter on the airwaves about ‘larger contexts’ and miniscule levels of societal ‘maturity’; there are summary prognostications of misuse; there is an affected venting of anger at the perpetrator of this heinous thirty seven year old act; and then, there is that entire array of ‘specialists’, mouthing arias that really don’t say anything real at all—either of the case, its players, or of society in general.
With salivating, gushing unscrupulousness (the pursuit of TRPs?), television channels have, however, in a matter of a couple of hours, shown a complete disregard for this victim of a menacing fortune. Even as they parrot paeans to a ‘historic, landmark judgment’, they treat its subject as a specimen in a zoo, telecasting in full the gory visuals of her quotidian existence, or airing intimate scenes from an interrupted life. Whose consent do they have? Yours; mine; Aruna’s? She may live, but what of those mundane matters of dignity and privacy? There is a lack of thought here, but there is also a chilling masochistic greed at play, for it seems to me that Aruna and her tale (if it can be called that) is nothing but backroom chatter, a sort of acoustic tune-setting for what will inevitably be, now, a spring-time of television studio ‘discussion’ where satisfaction with a life preserved will be showcased with middle-class aplomb to justify the maturity of this very condemned, immature society that is ours. Characteristic confusion: that is what I think it is.
Undoubtedly, it is a praise-worthy decision from the court, but only to the limit that it seeks to fill a void that our parliament will continually refuse to fill. Euthanasia, even in the most liberal or permissive, or for that matter, open societies is a political as well as a social hot-potato, eliciting opinions of ferocious divergence and evincing deep divisions. But the way it has been handled today, by the court, with equanimity, and by adding layers of sensibilities that do justice to this troublingly complex issue—and contrasting that with the almost orgy-like pronunciations of victory in the media, is a matter not only of deep distaste, but also of cultural shame.
There are doctors who hail it amidst the immaturity that pervades our society; but nobody speaks of or probes the huge costs of keeping people alive in this country. There are those who rail against the interruption of a promising life; but do they question their own implication in Aruna’s further, ‘Live’ degradation? There is celebration today that a right to life has been affirmed; but what of those who must, continually, countenance a faustian bargain in pursuit of living, everyday?
This case is important for a number of reasons, and I’m competent of only raising them perfunctorily. Beyond the false dichotomies of life versus death, or even the deeply polarising issue of taking life or allowing it to live, is a Foucaldian power-play, one that consistently seeks to create a normalizing society: to adjudicate on matters of the kind of life that it is worth living, one that consistently comments and forces upon us deliberations on ideal ways of living, one that constantly seeks to “qualify, measure, appraise, and hierarchize” in this normalizing society, to use a phrase from Michel Foucault. The mother that rocks this cradle, and I think the television accomplishes that role spectacularly well, is scarcely competent today to say anything at all about Aruna, about taking life, fostering it, celebrating it, or condemning it.
There is also that other, more troubling, more obvious, but less grappled with issue of structures and institutions—issues that have given potency to this discourse in the first place, where life, living, and bodies must consistently grapple with the costs of life and the bargains of living itself. Why is it so expensive to maintain life here, that one must countenance (and often, in many cases and places, it is the only valid choice), at every turn of one’s fortune, the prospect of death, and the spectre of that deliciously ironical phrase, ‘mercy killing’? Is there something much more insidious than a society’s mere “immaturity”? Doctors and hospitals—two of contemporary India’s most prominent gatekeepers (and reflectors) of discrimination and disparity—do they have any competence in pronouncing on a society’s index of maturity? Those pronouncements must come in spite amor fati, but from elsewhere, and surely not from those small citadels that have been built on the back of the overwhelming detritus of this society.
Ultimately, after all this, one will have to confront death and life on their terms. Having personally encountered the despair that comes from a life interrupted or broken, and having moved on, thanks to fortune, from that land of existential penumbra to a more optimistic plane, I can say that I still have no answers that will adequately answer the turmoil of euthanasia. It is a deeply troubling and distressing issue. How does one choose between life and death; more importantly, how does one sign away that right in situations where one is incapable of dealing with it oneself; who defines that capability; who examines the quality of life that is worth living? These are not issues that can be addressed in one ruling, in one afternoon, as the television would have us believe. They have troubled history, and they will continue to do so. Telecasting images of a most personal nature, projecting on to a living being the characteristics of zoo-dwelling being, attuning to all this heart-rending tunes and ersatz, digital, flickering candles onscreen—these are not, and never will be the road to answers. Becoming aware, as the court’s verdict has today forced us, of the complexities of issues, and arriving at the conclusion that a variety of methods—and not one golden rule—may be needed to be employed to this issue, may be.
As I conclude, I wish that Aruna finds some measure of comfort in the fact that she has made us think in ways that we would ordinarily not. The delusional, often sadistic ranting of our television brethren aside, I think one of those hurriedly interviewed guests asked to speak on today’s judgment put it well when she declared that at least this judgment takes us forward by catalysing the beginnings of a conversation. I only hope that the din and spurious pity, transmitted via satellite or on spectrum, does not drown it out in its own madness.
In Shera’s Den
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There used to be a time in the University of Delhi when people possessing anything below even a shade of superhuman prowess had to ‘negotiate’ with daily existence. You had to be careful, of a number of worthies—of dilapidated structures and fast vehicles, of roguish sidewalks and earthy drains, of dark minds and nefarious designs. For the disabled, then, venturing anywhere for anything really was a venture into the heart of an abyss. One didn’t know whether one would make it in and out with all body appendages intact; but hey, it was an existential game of Russian roulette: you had as good a chance as anybody else, and you knew that! The absence of facilities—footpaths, pavement, toilets, transport, recreation, access to libraries, etc.—was indeed a shame for everybody, but a shame that was cheerfully accepted, borne, and tempered by a genuine desire to help another. Or by the realism of the poverty of our claims, and its resultant apathy. It was an apathy slowly tempered, and it was of great use to us. There was, in this schema, no place for diabolical intent, or deceptive deliverance.
But we did it happily then: there were hardly any appropriate structures to tread on, roll over, sit on, or admire; that sleek umbrage of a stadium didn’t exist in the very heart of the university grounds; fancy sidewalks — with Braille! — didn’t emerge the night before and promise the hoary land of equal opportunity. All you had were the trees, the good dust, the certainty of uncertainties, and a handful of kind folk in the university offices. You simply made peace with this that you had—a chance to sit in dignity in a classroom and listen to the sonorous rotations of a dangerously clinging old fan, or an even older ‘specialist’ of the field. You walked or rolled to where you had to get to; someone helped. If you were very lucky, you had a friend who lasted; if you were in vogue, you had a pack.
And then came the Commonwealth Games. A malicious intelligence was now dancing to the tune of stumbling bodies, careless collisions, helpless wheelchairs (and their dwellers), and deadly disillusionment. In the aftermath of promises foretold and millions of dollars worth of dismemberment, there are sidewalks now that are four to six inches from the surface of the road. They end, in most places, even higher. These are sidewalks you can take—courtesy of Kalmadi & Company—and, if you are blind, emerge—stunned and pilloried—into the deathly light of pillars and precipices. For the rest, if you manage these, there is that diabolical monstrosity of man’s creation—the bollard—guarding entries and exits to these sidewalks. The Braille leads forever on, into the darkness of a patiently constructed, patiently enduring, pit. Trees have been cut and bold signage placed—leading us, the condemned, to spaces where you, dear mortal, would fear to tread. Welcome to the university of the pillar banging, of the pit dwelling.
This is the land where elevators—those false prophets that promise academic revelation on the first floor of your college or department or library will—we are told—take their twenty years to materialise; where ramps that will allow entry without discrimination raise their ugly slopes and spoil the visage of the masonry of glorious history and a timeless past. There are bicycle tracks here, but they generously accommodate cars; a unique oasis of a bookstore stands witness to a threatened existence. There are toilets here that do not find wheelchairs worthy of entry. There are books here, and people, but they are not here to read to those who cannot see. There are libraries here, and sidewalks, and markets, and toilets, but you cannot enter. There are classes here, and enchanting discussion, but you cannot partake of them, for they are at another level, forever taunting and tugging, beckoning and condemning. There are planners here, scheming for a better world—but they have forgotten us.
But mercifully, people here remain the same. Bhanot has not had his last laugh by reminding us of that insurmountable chasm that exists eastward and West of our civic needs. A smile and a kind word will do wonders here. It will even allow you access—overnight! — to books that have been elevated to that hallowed zone, that place in library heaven, that forbidden shelf –Not To Be Issued! It will bring the administrative bureaucracy, in good times, down to your level. It will open a door, or ease you onto that platform world that separates itself from the nether world—six inches below—of molten tar and puissant pillars and vehicular metal. It will, for a brief moment in your time here, make you believe that you are indeed one of the elected—that rare tribe of perfect teeth and awkward charm. And of course, this place will tell you, in it’s disarming pursuit of a better world—if ‘they’ cannot have sight to see, or spaces to inhabit the results of our modern grace, then let them have cars!
But the ever increasing sums of money that have been granted for our use—or so we have been made to believe—seem to vaporise in the hot, dead, treeless world of sparkling stadia and swanky buses, where that plastic monstrosity Shera rules and the blind, comically, barge into poles that the Braille has lead them into. Give them cars and they shall indeed get around!
