There is a dearth of books which have the power to raze the
status quo down to the ground and give the reader an uncanny tinge making them
realize that the issues which have been mundane and prosaic to them are not so
ordinary, one such book that stands out of the crowd and forces us to reflect
on an issue which we have either never cared about or have been too petrified
to look at is “Being Mortal” by Atul Gawande.
Human race, unskeptically, is a pretty peculiar race. We
distinguish ourselves from other creatures on the basis of our superior
cognitive, thinking and visualizing skills. We take up aims in our life, we
plan almost everything pertinent to life be it time, love, marriage or life
itself, but one thing about which we never worry is planning to die. The idea
of old age or senility has been so much of a killjoy that in our whole history
as the “superlative” race of the world, we never got the time or we never
showed enough courage to think about how our life will end one day. We have
hitherto never shown any concern about the day when everything will cease to
exist for us and we for everything else; we have never had a dekko over how
will the realization of mortality strike us one day and will make us realize
that no matter how much great, charming or charismatic we have been, our end
will not be very much different from anyone else. We just like every other
creature are equally vulnerable to the arduous realities of nature.
Being Mortal thus hits at the right spot. It makes
you peep over something which you have been snubbing off for so long and in
this effort, it also touches upon how science and medicine have had their set
of constriction. One of the best
apothegms that I have been told is that sometimes it is not life but the way of
life that matters most to us. While loving our life and prizing it above
anything else, we tend to put a blind eye to the way of life which in actuality
holds more vitality than life itself. A famous proverb goes like this, “I have
always lived in light, so what if I live for a day less.” Gawande’s book raises
this important question through his medical experience. When old age strikes
our door, it is not having white hair or wrinkled skin that people detest, it
is an ineffably vexing feeling that we can no longer live life by our terms.
Suddenly your freedom is snatch away from you and you are left being a
dependent. In one moment, the ability to take decisions for oneself, the power
to decide how we want our lifestyle to be shaped and the reassurance that we are
not dependent on others are the major things that we adore in our life.
Every child wants to be an adult as soon as possible because
children believe that being an adult gives us the opportunity to take our own
onus and execute things that way we want. However, the present medicine world
as well as the people themselves have not been able to unravel this naïve fact.
Though it is not out of sheer ignorance that we disregard others freedom when
they are old but because of our callow. We never worry about old age until it
comes in our vicinity and hence when dealing with old people, we never figure
out that one day the same situation would strike our door and we, too, would be
standing there at the mercy of someone else’s decision. We put our old people
is nursing homes and old age homes where they don’t have the basic freedom to
decide what they want to eat, when we want to bathe and believe that we have
done our best. But, if you think in terms of that person who is being made to
go through all this, it is nothing less than incarcerating them in the name of
their health. All through their lives, these people have made their own choices
and now because of an impetuous decision of ours finally they are rendered
paralyzed in their whole life. Nobody out there tries to fathom the reason
behind their resentment and to conceal our own failures we term them dotards
and their behavior a consequence of their senility. The purpose of all the
sciences in the world is to make the human race independent. We developed Physics
because we don’t want to be at mercy of nature, we developed medicine because
we wanted to free ourselves of nature’s calamities, we develop Chemistry
because we wanted to produce more than what’s in the nature. Human being, since
the very inception of earth, has been in search of freedom but haplessly in
this case, we spurn the needs of these people, treat their wants with contempt
and finally subjugate themselves to live the life of a thrall. This deeply
saddens me to see how good and callous we have become at doing this. Now, it
has become customary to obliterate their freedom in the name of care and to
annihilate their desires in the name of love.
Author also touches upon “when to let go of things.”
Sometimes, while pursuing something, we become so much profoundly indulgent in
it that we start thinking more about the procedure rather than the end goal we
want. We become entangled in the process so much that we finally forget what
our goal was initially. The same happens when one of our loved ones is fighting
against an incurable disease. Though we know the outcome, yet owing to our
incessant love for them, we make them suffer. We try different things which can
ultimately make them live a month longer but will sequester themselves from
what they used to be. Author gives the example of various patients in whose
case it was lucid that they couldn’t survive, yet rather than accepting that
fact that this unfortunate thing has happened with them, they try so many
different treatments which though prolongs their life by a few days but
trounces the very meaning of their life. They are left paralyzed, dependent and
at the mercy of others just because we chose to refute that fact that we are
not indomitable. Doctors too are guilty in this. They prescribe medicines, tell
their patients about various options available but never ask them whether the
patients are ready to incur the cost that will come up with these options. The
work of a doctor is not just to blurt out some new fancy operations but to
rather understand what the patient really wants, what would be the opportunity
cost in their respect, are they indeed ready to put their freedom on altar for
the sake of a few days. As a society, all of us fail in this regard, because in
the end, having the freedom to steer our life to the very last breath is much
more valued in anyone’s else. We need to sensitize ourselves with the fact that
rather than imposing our decision on these people, we must let them die the way
they have lived: bold, brave and independent. In the coming age of technology,
rather than becoming more detached from their desires, we need to make sure
that we get the essence of whatever they want, because if we don’t them
somebody else would also follow the same course for us.
JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT
JAI MA BHARTI
