To Live And Die In Dignity Poem by Aniruddha Pathak

We wonder if he should have died in vain,
Deprived of donating organs still good,
Begetting freedom from benumbing pain,
Should justice deny Death its civil hood?

But white wigs, with their wisdom-filled notions,
Decided to stick to letters of law—
That man and his death-bed aspirations
Be buried with his head, unfulfilled raw.

Lame to me looks legal right to live life
With no matching right peacefully to die,
With no right to shed tattered rags in ply,
What's freedom suffering in bed so rife?

If a life's not allowed in peace to die,
In mind as in spirit, it's dead well nigh.
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A chess player from Hyderabad, and a long-suffering patient of muscular dystrophy on a ventilator, died recently an unhappy man. He valiantly fought, with the help of his mother and sister, a long legal battle but in vain— for a right to die (euthanasia)and donate his organs to save other lives. The courts however ruled that he cannot donate his organs before he was brain dead, sheer technicality. What is death but a step closer to man's long journey, his cosmic destiny? A man cannot his next step take before he is dead. Bhagavad-Gita says: the body is like a garment, and in death a man merely changes worn out garments for the new.
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Happenings | 07.12.04 |