euthanasia

Recently I read about a 79-year-old man who appealed to his state high court to be given permission to carry out assisted suicide- euthanasia. He’s a freelance journalist who is crippled by a series of chronic illnesses. He said he is no longer is capable of taking care of his daily functions by himself. Even more interesting is that in court he argued his case based on Hindu and Jain ideology that he is allowed to house his soul in a new body. He took the argument out of the dichotomy of life/death and added another dimension to it. damn interesting:

Indian scribe pleads for mercy killing

A 79-year-old freelance journalist has petitioned the Rajasthan High Court seeking permission for euthanasia, saying he wants to die with dignity.

In his petition filed on Wednesday, Giriraj Prasad Gupta pleaded for mercy killing on the ground that he was unable to perform his day-to-day functions independently and did not want to lead a crippled life waiting for death.

He said he had a hearing problem, diabetes, poor vision and heart disorders. He has been operated upon for hernia and prostate, and he had fractured his legs and hands once. He said he wanted to "die with dignity" rather than become a bedridden patient waiting for death.

The journalist clarified that he was loved and taken care of by his family members, who were all well settled. He also said that he was able to earn Rs. 8,000 a month.

Arguing that the Hindu scripture Bhagavad Gita and the Jain philosophy speak of immortality and reincarnation, Gupta said he wanted to facilitate transfer of his soul into a new body.

Gupta's counsel N.C. Goel said his client wanted to die with dignity, for which he would require a doctor's help and the doctor should also not be penalised for it.

- Indo-Asian News Service from www.rxpgnews.com

I’ve always been interested in ideas surrounding the value of life over death and why one is more valuable than the other. Once a friend said to me suicide is a choice people should understand they have, but not an option they should exercise. That was said in the context of how realizing the value of life is power and that one has some control over his/her life. This man’s argument suggests that his life is essentially in his mind no longer viable and so let him “die” and try again so to speak. He seems to e empowering himself by taking the whole cycle into his hands. Seeing life as one of many as opposed to just one really changes the concept of life/death. The more I let this sit in my mind I realize it’s a boggling shift in perspective.

Dharavi

This is the area of Mumbai known as 'Asia's lagest slum'. The slums are a preoccupation for me. I just read an article with a great graphic about plans to resettle and develop the slum into a more livable area. I do wonder where all these people will go. According to the article approximately 3lakh (300,000) people live there now, and many of them will be displaced.

'NEW'

L'oreal, WhitePerfect. whitening cream- "Because you're worth it." madness.

the country in the city

Today went for a toss and threw me in too. The weather is becoming unbearable, even at 8 am the sun and humidity felt like mid-day heat. I dropped my clothes in a public squat-toilet by accident today. I spent the day expelling the poisonous wrath of three-day-old food and nursing a throbbing heat-stroke headache. After dropping my clothes in the toilet I found my way home, threw away the clothes, turned on the ac, had a long hot shower,and crawled between my beautiful, cool, blue bed sheets.

I know you want to know how I dropped my clothes in a public toilet. I can say that in that moment I craved the nearly sterile facilities of my childhood home. The story's a bit embarrassing and one I would tell if I could be slightly inebriated. So, buy me a drink next time I see you, and I'll tell you how it happened. ;)

Earlier this week, a man had knocked on our flat door to tell us to shut the windows. He planned to remove honey from the beehive outside of our building and he did not want any to fly into our home. The lady-of-the-house told him to bring the honeycomb to our flat so we could watch him extract the honey. The guy was dressed in an untucked, short-sleeved, cream button-down shirt, brown flood water trousers, and he was barefoot. He smoked out the bees (somehow managed not to get stung or is used to it) and carefully pulled out the comb. When he came up stairs we gave him large pots and he strained the comb and this translucent amber liquid flowed into the pots. He ended up extracting 7kgs of honey! He said this is the season that bees take the nectar of jamun and hence the honey has a slight jamun flavor. Sometimes natural honey has a back-bite, but this is smooth tasting and a little fruit-yumdelicious.

where i sit

The weather is filling the air with heat and humidity and it will burst into monsoon come june. i'm hardpressed to leave the house after noon, especially because my work day does not begin until any time between 4pm to 5:30 pm. After work I tend to be wide awake and buzzing with the day's residue- ideal for going to the gym normally. At 2 am I'm left with my own thoughts or sitting in an over-priced coffee shop of a luxury hotel with some colleagues listening to them wax politics. There is normalcy in the fact that at least the five of us share the same wacked out schedule.

Daily, I am pretty amused that this motley crew of young folk decides what hits the pages for the next day. When you grow up reading the paper you never really think about who is formulating the news, choosing the news, designing the layout of the news. At least I assumed someone conveying the news would have a certain knowledge that I don' t have access too. That's not really true. Journalists tend to be intensely curious, news/gossip oriented, information-seeking, question-asking, fun-loving. They tend to ask impertinent questions, and good ones are very hungry for the story. They talk about story in terms of "meat" and extraneous informtion as "flab". Carnivorous lot.

I think I relegated myself to the editing desk at least for a while because this hunger freaked me out. On my first day reporting they sent me to the home of this kid who had managed to stop an AlItalia flight from taking off by saying there was a bomb on board (made national news). His reason, according to schoolmates, were that he was upset he did not make the MUN delegation to go to Geneva and he didn't want his girlfriend to go without him. I was so weirded out by how easy it was to find his address, his phone number, his building. He lives in an old-money part of town. There were security guards sitting there, but I walked right in and took the elevator straight to his door. I got the door slammed in my face three times by the houseman. I tried talking to others in the building but not knowing Hindi was a major barrier. I couldnt believe that I had so blatantly tried to invade their privacy for what at that point was gossip- how could a kid do that? why would a kid do that? etc. Anyway after that I wanted to sit safely away from the craziness for a while. What I am learning though is that getting a good story has only to do with a sense of picking up clues, knowing how to spin an argument, and having a sense of urgency about the story.

I think I talked about this before, the Alitalia thing. Anyway, sorry if pete and repeat walk into a bar, pete sat down, who's still standing? repeat . If pete and... :P

Branded

I‘ve been thinking about lots of things to tell you guys this week. I have been thinking about the presence of LGBT in this country. I have been thinking about race- concepts of race, politics of race, hate-crimes….I have also been thinking about gelato.

Tonight I went to the only gelateria I know of in Mumbai and chatted with the owners of it. They were interviewed by TimeOut Mumbai. The guy and his co-owners are fairly young. When I went in I asked to sample certain flavors. The first one I chose was the chocolate chip cookie surprise. When I picked it, I thought, “I must be missing home” because I was hoping it tasted like chocolate chip cookie dough ice cream. When he handed me the taster he said, “Are you American?” And I said, “Mm, yeah.” He said, “I knew because you chose a very American flavor.” Then I heard the woman standing next to him ask some customer if he needed help and she had an American accent. But He sounded like he had lived between the two countries or more for most of his life. His accent sounded ‘global’, neither here nor there, so I didn’t know from where he originated. Turns out they are both from Los Angeles and she’s his cousin who flew in from Hyderabad to help him out. He asked where I was from and he knew the ‘burgh! His bro had attended high school in the city of bridges (no longer ‘the steel city’ people). I was happy to chat with them. I wanted to stay for some time. I decided to leave as they seemed busy but maybe I‘ll go back and ask if they want to hangout sometime. They’re the first ‘normal’ expats I’ve met here.

Most are these new age hippies that are thrilled to be invited to all these society parties but don’t really know that they are part of the ambience and décor. They tend to be people who have come to India to find themselves but more likely to reinvent themselves. Or I meet some corporate types who are stationed here for work and happy for the affordable shopping but can’t wait to run into their promotion back in “the first world”. A conversation I overheard at FabIndia, a store which sells handwoven cotton clothes for dailywear from all over India illustrates the mentality I often run into:

Woman 1: Is this ‘too india’?
Woman 2: It’s a little ‘too india’, but it’s ‘pretty india’
Woman1: What about this, is this ‘too india’? I can’t buy anything ‘too india’ because then I can’t wear it, you know?
Woman 2: Oh, I know the stuff here is ‘so india’, not like the tunics (aka kurtis) we normally buy.
Woman1: Yeah, how can you wear ‘india’ everyday?
This went on for another ten minutes, then looking up from her book keeping
Store manager (quietly): Please leave the store.
Woman 1: Really? Oh…okay.
Woman 2: There’s nothing here anyway.

I feel pummeled with this idea of ‘india’ as brand because much of the news I read coming across the wires is about how India is marketing itself to move into the center position of the global market. News about ISB grads making 1 crore (approx. 233,000 usd) out of b-school, news of the nuclear deal and its parameters, 50% reservations for India ‘Centres of excellence’ II schools, OICs getting their right to vote…I’m getting the sense that the government and their partners are changing the course of things, like turning around a massive Viking ship.

Lately I have been keenly aware of ads for whitening creams. Fair and handsome, fair and lovely is an old favorite and now Garnier is marketing a cream that is supposed to lighten you skin color with 94% efficacy. This vulnerability, the desire to be fair, is older than British colonialism. I also thought about how racism is so insidious, it exists here where seemingly the society is homogenous. Also Crash made its debut here and people are talking about it.

Someone told me he felt it was contrived and too dramatic. I told him maybe in terms of the linkages between the stories, but those kinds of race-related violences do happen like faith-based violence happens here. I wasted my breath though because he chose to employ ‘straw person fallacy’ tactic.

Odd that he couldn’t understand what I was saying because just before we had this conversation he gasped when he saw that I left a line in an article that I edited about a certain Prophet’s personal life. He and another spun around and asked me if I was trying to incite a riot, especially in light of the cartoon riots. Even though the article was a reference to what someone other than the reporter had written about the Prophet’s life, these guys still had visions of angry rioters outside of our office.

The article was about this Bengali writer who chooses to write about and say scandalous things by denouncing religious figures/icons by linking them to sexuality/sensuality. He received an award named for a deity that he had claimed to have feelings of lust for when he admired a statue of her at the age of 12. He said he kissed the statue and experienced pleasure from the kiss. The way he actually relayed the information was poetic- he linked the fact that she was the goddess of learning to his awakening sense of adolescence. When I tried to discuss this with a friend, his face clouded over and he said, “Kav, in this society, saying something like that is equivalent to someone publicly saying he performed fellatio on a Jesus-statue.” Whoa, point taken.

As race is in the American context, religion is in the Indian context. You have to be careful about what you say, be aware of your audience, and try not to step on too many landmines about the issue unless you have good reason too.

LGBT for another time….

god's gift

This city is throbbing with life. It’s hot. really hot. Something about the heat, the humidity, teeming with people- something about it all makes this very fertile ground. This is the season for alphonso mangos. I have been looking forward to eating this type of mango for a little over a year. Last night when k picked me up he surprised me with three of the precious fruit. These mangos are the Bombay Sapphire of mango. They’re classic, so sweet, messy, tart, juicy and fragrant.

For some reason tropical fruit never tastes the same when I buy the imports from the mega-grocery store in the dead of winter. But on these long hot days, the fruit is life-juice. The fragrance of each fruit is enhanced- unique to the fruit. Pomegranates, grapes, oranges, apples…everything holds taste that is different and multifaceted.

April Fool's Day

'sup folks? Life at work is very good, knock on wood. Life all around is going well. It's been a very long time since I have felt so calm and even keel. I don't know if I ever really felt this balanced before moving here. I always wanted a 'TLC' (The Learning Channel) existence. I would watch those shows- A Wedding Story, A Makeover Story, A Baby Story- and wonder how they found so many stable people for those shows. I am still quite, mmm, expressive, but the undercurrent is light, lots of warm light.

You guys should really check out Riverbend. I love reading it. I tried to add the link to the links list but it's not working for some reason. The link within the text of my last post is though, so check it out.

I did take pics of me and I realise the way I look has changed,at least to me- my hairline is receding, my nose is bigger, and my eyes loook moony- i'm morphing into a fictional old man. The kind of old man you imagine shoos kids from his doorstep in fairy tales.

I am learning so much about how people live in this city. So many secrets are kept from those people most care about and told to everyone else. I had a long conversation with a new friend about some secrets we know. She filled in some of the blanks for me and I kind of felt just sad to know more. I think I felt sad because people ruin their lives for the dumbest reasons. I have tripped many times and landed on my head and eventually figure how to get my feet back on the ground. The secret-life-person is making the kind of mistake you have to just let people make and hope for the best. We are not close by any stretch of the imagination but I have walked down that road once,and it didnt feel good. I cringe to think that this person is whistling while they walk down this dreary road, feeling only the sun through the branches of dead trees.