Euthanasia

“There is a thin line between life and death… and it keeps getting thinner everyday.” With the advancement of life-support systems, the black-and-white of the living and the dead has been smudged with a lot of grey; we are daily pushing the limits of life. Conditions once considered indicative of death are now reversible. Proper help can revive, or at least stabilize, the most far gone cases. So, the same person who would be pronounced dead in a small town may be pronounced alive if taken to a good institute.

Ironically, the more improvements we make in the field of healthcare, the more difficult it gets to define the very basic foundation of healthcare: Life, and its opposite, Death. Death was earlier defined as the stopping of respiration but that got outdated by the introduction of ventilators and heart-lung machines. Death is now defined as the cessation of mental activities, for whatever reason it may be. It is also called brain death. But nowadays we have equipments that can keep a person far beyond our help lingering on to life by some feeble impulse of his brain. This is where euthanasia or ‘mercy killing’ comes into picture.

Only a few decades ago, mercy killing would have meant squishing an ant that was writhing in pain after tearing one of its legs but now, due to the advancement of technology, the same concept has to be applied to humans too.

Let’s face it, when a member of the family is in the hospital, the whole family is like in a limbo. Time is divided into visiting hours and non-visiting hours. If, on top of that, no one is sure whether the person is dead or alive or how long they will stay in the current state, it is even more difficult for the family. In that case, they can neither stay put nor move on. However cruel or heartless it may sound, I firmly believe that it is good for everyone if they are allowed to move on in such cases.

Moreover, if the patient himself is in terrible pain or discomfort with only a negligible chance of revival, is it not only human to try to relieve him of the suffering? How often have you said to yourself while reading about such cases – “It would have been better if he had died.” ? If we can’t deliver cure to a person why should we tie up our hands and sit silently listening to his cries of pain? It is an act of compassion, not brutality. Recently there was a case where a terminally ill patient travelled all the way from the UK to USA so that his son could pull the plug on him without it being a crime.

But there are lots of questions and lots of clarifications that will have to be addressed before any such thing can be implemented. Some of them being: Who will decide whether a person is dead or alive when even the doctors have not been able to agree on a definition of death and when the definition can be neutralized suddenly by another invention? Whose decision should it be to pull the plug when the time comes? Euthanasia can also lend itself to misuse very easily and there would have to be an extremely tight check so that no one is able to do so.

Despite all these drawbacks, euthanasia is a very humane concept and has been slowly gaining acceptance worldwide.

Random Ramblings

Staring up at the stars starts chains of thought that would surprise you if you caught yourself thinking of them. These are some of my thoughts while I was half-asleep on the bus journey from Manali to Delhi.


You know you are in a mountainous region when you can’t differentiate between a star and the light coming from a house at the top. We are supposed to have 3D eyes…i.e. we are supposed to be able to differentiate distances but still it is impossible to differentiate between these. Stars make us realize how insignificant we would be in front of a larger body. The stars - larger than the largest thing we can imagine, standing unimaginable distances apart from each-other – look so tiny to our eyes that our forefathers were able to imagine figures in the night sky, as if they were playing ‘Connect the Dots’ on a piece of paper. The astronomical sizes involved are just numbers to everyone, even to those who do these calculations everyday; no one ever could have possibly imagined the distance everyone knows as one lightyear, or even one lightsecond which itself in 3 lakh kilometers (again just a number). I remember it was something like 2,99,792 point something kilometers to be exact as I memorized it once upon a time to brag about it to my friends who, till then didn’t even know that light and sound also travel. Douglas Adams was right in Hitchhiker’s when he said that the most terrible torture invented was a machine (Total something something) that showed a person his place in the universe in proportion to his size. The sheer enormity would be enough to make you go mad. In fact, just 1 AU compared to the size of a person, if shown to scale, will be enough to make anyone go mad.

Why is it that we feel a vague sense of longing when we stare up at the stars or stare out to the sea? Is it the well-known restlessness that humans are famed to possess? Is it the mystery of the unknown and the unseen that beckons us? Or is it simply that we are so engrossed in our immediate surroundings that it takes an unchanging scene for us to realize that in this rapidly changing world there is a small part of us that yearns for stability? You suddenly start thinking about people and things that haven’t been around you in a long while. You remember the place that you grew up in, the field where you used to play with friends whom you have lost touch with. You think of the people you were close to once but have fallen out with now. You miss the sights and sounds that were a part of everyday life when you were young. You miss all those moments of life, all those small things that you never had really cared about.


This was when the bus started playing Om Shanti Om and my chain of thoughts got disturbed. :|