For Aruna Shanbaug…

For Aruna Shanbaug… | March 7, 2011

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.