Not Really Sure How To Feel About It...

“You are Will Traynor. Not in a wheelchair but in bumble bee tights.” This message from a friend was followed by a lot of laughter smileys. I am too ashamed to mention the number of smileys that followed. When I asked my friend what the message meant, he asked me to read Me before you by Jojo Moyes. This guy listened to the audio book along with his wife while they commuted to work. My friend told me the only person he could think of was me. (Yay!)

I got the book. Read it. I was offended by afore mentioned message. WT is a very rude man restricted by a wheelchair and is obnoxious, a bully, judges people, laughs at their ignorance, is rude, likes people who are rude and imposes his likes and way of life on others and primarily enjoys telling people how to live their life. In his life before the wheelchair he was living an extreme life.

As applicable as all of that is to me, I want to mention in my defense that sometimes offence is the best defense. Growing up I had absolutely no say in which school I would study, or who my classmates would be. As I grew I realized that I didn’t really need to interact with people and feel miserable about how left out I was in the entire picture. Considering we had absolutely nothing in common to have a conversation which could go beyond, “Hi. How are you?”, “I am fine.” Which usually left me wanting to get all my pent up conversations out in the universe. I did that by writing in my journal. Then as I grew into my teens I decided that I would broaden my horizons and started writing to a friend (On a different Continent). We exchanged letters for over 7 years and continued to emails and we finally have graduated to skype/hangouts. The moment I realized how much difference one person could make to my life I decided that I really was better off away from ANYBODY who made me unhappy.

Over the years I have made friends, some of whom I have known since I was 2years old and most of the people I know have been my friends at least for 5 years and some of whom I haven’t met in person, just via social media.

In this spectrum of friends there is a set that falls in the category of, “I’m your pet, be nice and do as I say.” (This constitutes all my favorite people. Here family members and friends all amalgamate to become this one giant organism - imagine a plush teddy bear with a neutral expression if you wish.) So I like telling my teddy bear about the books and music I like. I like to coax them on occasion to read a book to challenge their gender or watch a movie just so that we can talk about it because no one I know has watched it and I am not particularly fond of writing reviews on movies. I like writing but I also like talking. Considering how tiny a group I like to converse with I have to at times nudge them incessantly to read what I recommend.

This particular friend of mine has been a subject of my experiment. I have loaned him my books. ( I can’t mention which.) (I  don’t like people worrying about being teased.) Here is the thing though, he loved some of them and this led us to talk about how as little kids we read Enid Blyton’s Famous Five, Secret Seven, Five Finder –outers, The R Mystery series. All of these have boys and girls and a dog and a cat. But as we grew older, girls read Malory Towers, Chalet School, Nancy Drew, The Three Investigators and Hardy Boys but most of the boys only read the Three Investigators and The Hardy Boys. Leading to my favorite question – Why? I don’t think boys are particularly interested in learning about faults, ego, temper, vanity and other aspects of human nature. At that age they are merely interested in adventure and blood and bikes and curiosity about everything without the important element of understanding human behavior. Whereas girls at a very young age are being told about having their P’s and Q’s in order without imposing a gender specific code. It was then that my friend told me that he would have thought the books silly if he had read them when he was 11 and more importantly that was definitely not the kind of story that would interest him. In one of the books that I lent him, there is a little 7 year old boy and my friend could easily sympathize with his behavior. He felt a kinship with the male characters always telling me, “This was written by a woman. She knows boys. That’s exactly what I was thinking too. How does she know what boys think!”

We grew some more and in our 20’s we started discussing more books. During one such discussion I pointed out that when a man writes he talk about his experience with a girl be it sexual or just a conversation and all the boys say, “Oh yeah! I know what that feels like.” The girls on the other hand are thinking, “If you could only stop speculating of how she is going to react and let things happen naturally, you have to open your mouth and say something downright stupid? Of course the woman is going to storm off!” I am pretty sure here that this author in a few years understood why the woman did what she did. So instead of it being a situation in the book it could have been a bridge of sorts to understand the genders better. Again probably boys are just as flummoxed as girls when it comes to broaching friendships and relationships. Girls just tend to be a bit more sensitive and restrained for obvious reasons.(I am kicking myself for “obvious reasons”, but again let’s be honest not all the men we meet have stayed on as good friends and there is always that one ex who will tell his friends about the time that he was totally manipulated into the relationship – she made a move, I’m just a guy. Why would I say no?)

By the time we are 22-23 we tend to grasp situations involving the opposite gender better. We are past the, “You waxed your legs!”, “Your chest was as flat as mine before holidays, how did that happen? I am not staring I just want to know how anything can grow that fast.” To which I had retorted with “ You shaved? What stubble are you talking about?”, [These are instances of conversations that I had and I remember and continued to cringe every time I thought about it for a few years.] By 25 we are set, we understand each other better. We are nicer to each other and know how to compliment without offending.

Yes, books, the stories, the characters, the author all lead to reasonable questions and it is always fun to exchange perspectives on them. If it makes you understand people better why not?

It’s when you reach a level of comfort discussing matters with each other whatever the subject, you feel free to even have a take on the offensive only to understand how any subject matter can be twisted out of context. Let’s be honest, everything ever written or spoken always gets twisted. Why not step into the shoes of the twister and cause havoc in the comfort of your living room with people who will understand where the broken structures are coming from. I like knowing and I like it better when I understand. I like being informed. Not because it will lead to something, only because I want to know what my choices are and whether there is scope for improvement in a situation and if that improvement can somehow be inculcated in my own personal sphere.

So yes, I’m a bully. But it is just a little girl talking to her bear and trying to understand the world a little better.

Right now I want to talk to the bear about Euthanasia and Physician Assisted Suicide…

(Let’s pretend the blog is my living room and we are all a little tipsy and that I like you enough to have this discussion with you. Okay?)

I didn’t cry at the end of the book. While I was reading I kept thinking about the time I broke my wrist, my ulna, dislocated my elbow, bruised/cracked a couple of ribs, broke a toe and every time I had to depend on someone to help me travel from point A to B because public transport involves a lot of shoving and that wouldn’t have helped me get better any sooner. BUT I HATED DEPENDING on someone. I hated how I had to work my time table around another person for a period of time. Hated how I couldn’t get angry about not being somewhere on time because this other person was doing me a favor. I remember even then saying that if I ever become bed ridden kill me because I would not be able to handle it.

The humiliation, pain and dependency especially in your adulthood is just wrong. To have someone do for you what you had been capable of doing and then completely lost the ability to ever do that again is just painful. To go and be able to sit on the pot yourself is a task we take for granted but imagine not being able to do that. That for me would be the first breaking point and it would go on with each task for which I would require to be assisted until anybody who had been able to fully function on their own starts screaming for Dignitas.

Physician Assisted Suicide doesn’t mean that a doctor will assist you to do the following:

1.           Slash your wrists for you.

2.           Once you are up and hanging, move the stool from under your feet.

3.           Gas you instead of oxygen.

4.           Stab you till you scream bloody suicide.

5.           Medicate you with sleeping pills crushed in your drink.

6.           Make you eat rat poison or any other rodent killing capsule.

You get the drift, don’t you? Assisted suicide requires the person who wants to take this step to make his/her decision after which it is ascertained if this decision is being made under duress. The doctor makes sure that the person so suffering is in-fact terminally ill or so physically crippled that it leads to a series of hospital visits just to keep said person motivated enough to sit in their wheel chair or bed. Remember Kolavennu Venkatesh from Andhra Pradesh? In 2004 the papers were all about his pleas to the AP High Court to permit him to end his life. He passed on just 2 days after the Court pronounced its judgment. It was pretty obvious that the Court would have denied him the right to do so. All I remember thinking at that time is, “This man’s mother loves him so much, she is ready to go to the Courts for her son. That must be so difficult. I can’t even imagine her thoughts or fathom how she managed to numb herself to do that for her child.”

Have you watched the 2011 documentary – Choosing to Die where Terry Pratchett talks us through the steps at dignitas and the last moments of Peter Smedley’s life? Then there is Brittany Maynard who also because of a brain tumor ended her life. When you keep your eyes open to look at one aspect of what is plaguing the world you start seeing a vast number of these cases where people petition the court to be allowed to end their lives.

As of March 2011, the Apex court in India has permitted Passive Euthanasia and has scrapped Section 309 of the Indian penal Code which back then seemed like a very big step. But what has happened since then? As of today there is no law on euthanasia. What happened to letting a person make a choice? Why should someone else make a choice on their behalf? Isn’t living life with dignity a constitutional right? When people can screech from roof tops for freedom of speech, how about espousing it for a cause that will really make a difference? Why can’t people who can talk, but need assistance in every other aspect of their day to day life seek a doctor approved ( Affirming of course that there is no cure, or no scope for any improvement in the future.) permission to call it a day?

Here I would like to assert that I do not take life lightly nor do I believe that any terminally ill person, or who is physically incapacitated or is suffering from an illness that is merely rapidly cutting down his life span and such a person is seeking to close a chapter, should always seek for PAS or AE. Propose a bill. Chalk out guidelines. Mark out details about consulting doctors, psychiatrists, Counsellors. Let the ACT require the family to appear before the Court so that they can state their objections to the individual’s decision. Let the court take note of these objections to establish that the individual wasn’t/isn’t being coerced into taking the final step. But it is high time that we started talking about it. My point is that EVERYBODY should have a choice. The point of this entire post is that people in these situations have no choice.

The entire object of freedom is the ability to make a choice. Living anywhere in the world should give you the freedom of making a choice for yourself without infringing others rights. But we are unfortunately denied the right to make a choice when a particular act (Action) is deemed illegal. Given the society we live in there are so many factors that one has to consider while taking a decision – religion, morals, ethics, family, lawfulness of their action, getting the entire country to decide ones fate, national debates(IN that order) etc… While through it all we FORGET THE ONE FACTOR THAT IS PARAMOUNT-THE INDIVIDUAL’S CHOICE. So it goes. And so it shall remain… for a while.

FYI: Active Euthanasia is when the doctor/Physician directly administers the mode of ending the individuals life. (Individuals request and consent is required.)

Physician assisted suicide is when the Doctor/physician prescribes a drug that if taken in high dosage proves lethal, or provides any other aid to help the individual. (On individuals request and consent.)

P.S: I will try not to write about death. I’m sorry if this post makes you sad here listen to my favorite song by Rihanna.
Edit: This song seems more appropriate though - Suicide is Painless

Peace. ☮