EUTHANASIA

Euthanasia means mercy killing i.e. ending the life of a person to relieve him from pain. It usually involves removal or withholding of life support system on which a patient is dependent. There is a large ongoing debate on whether to legalize euthanasia, also called assisted suicide in many countries. It is a complicated thing because the issues relevant are many. The objective of assisted suicide is definitely to relieve the patient of the unbearable pain and suffering wherein the chances of a life ahead don’t seem to score in the trade-off. But still the basic complication comes that whose consent should count, even if we are considering such an ending of pain ethical. Should it be the patient (who in some circumstances might not judge his situation correctly and would be driven by the inflicted pain) or his relatives (who are free from the pain to be unbiased and deserve to take decisions for the suffering patient to some extent) or the doctor (who can also make a neutral decision, medically guided)? Again, the answer can’t not simply be doctor and/or relatives as it would be unfair to the patient. The neutral guys are actually not undergoing the pain to understand it fully. This sort of makes it a difficult loop of reasoning. Also, in some cases, it might not even be possible to procure what the patient wishes. This then puts the decision-makers in a problematic position. The other side of the coin says that the very concept of ending life like this is unethical, the very same argument that holds for suicide. In fact, one of the arguments even goes like “If you allow assisted suicide, then suicide shall definitely be legal as the difference between the two is simply that of physical and mental suffering.” I completely disagree with such a form of reasoning. The kinds of pains involved are not so directly comparable and there lies a huge difference, according to me, in the coping powers of our mind and body.
In most of the countries, assisted suicide is illegal. However, in recent times, there have been countries who have legalized it like Netherlands, Belgium, Norway etc and in many, there are organizations supporting to get it legalized. However, one interesting thing is that attempted suicide is not a direct offence in many more countries, but still assisted suicide is. The reason behind that is that it is viewed more like a kind of homicide than a suicide really. This mentality shall change in the coming time, but obviously with such a framework that takes into account the ‘loop’ I was talking of and also seeks the answer to a greater extent from medicine side.
Please post in comments as to what you think, as this is rather a topic to discuss than write about.

HUMANS AND SOCIAL LIVING

This thing occupied my mind sometime back when I read two books Into the wild and Walden. In their own ways, both the guys wanted to be away from living in the so-called society. They wanted to uncover a life, more at ease and real than the one they were living. The question that came to me was: Wouldn’t living in solitude solve many problems for a person? Then, it started appearing in a logical fashion why ‘society’ at all and what does social living entail? It’s pretty clear that it is possible to exist as a species without collective living. The first kind of collective living started way before man and in fact in very early beings too. This must have happened in two stages: first, the concept of a mother (birth giver) and later on a father and family would have come. Sometime later, animals started living with each other for very fundamental reasons like security and sharing food, which enhance survival chances. Social living in short is a favorable notion from the perspective of evolution and hence its place in the world today. What are the negative sides to society: since beings have evolved to a whole new complexity level and with so many changes, the role of society can’t be so directly assessed. It still benefits the living of us present humans in countless dimensions, but some feel the other negative side too: need to be unnatural at times, obligation for some conventions like believe what others do, live with people affecting your life at times beyond your control etc etc. It is obvious that what one is today is what he is by himself and what others have made of him all these years. There is a coexistence of such two entities inside us and some people want to be one edge and some on the other. Lets further clear what these parts really are: I’ll take some broad things/ topics that relate to our living significantly and see which entity it belongs to. Politics/War/Law, religion, language (communication), commerce/economics, some complex emotions like jealousy etc are things that one would not see if we lived as loners. On the other hand, there exists a list of things that are innate to a being: basic emotions/drives, ideas/cognition, arts/entertainment, curiosity, interaction with environment and other species. These would have been irrespective of whether we live as a social being or not. They might have shaped pretty differently however in absence of collective living. I don’t hold either of the extreme side views and think both, living as an individual and living as a piece of a machinery have their importance. There is no conclusion I really got to and neither was I seeking one :) So, was there any alternative possible in the history? Well, when it comes to the question of collective living, there are only two possibilities (YES/NO) and one is favored by natural selection, so it just had to happen. However, societies can still be shaped in many ways, there is no unique prototype like the kind of picture we have of our present. And so has been the case. Anthropology has shown that all the kind of societies that have existed in the past have been pretty diverse in their features. Across time and space, nature has tried and will continue to do her experiments with the kind of way we live. The survival is of course, of the fittest.

Anyone interested in nature related topics, read Discover magazine (I go through its online blogs) and NatGeo magazine’s blog. They are worth following.

READING UPDATE

Anyone interested in history (not just wars and empires) can pick these books:

• A short history of the world- H.G.Wells: This book is a collection of facts related to our world right from the time earth came to existence and origin of life to growth of civilizations and up until world war II
• Guns, germs and steel – Jared Diamond : Despite its weird title, the book is on the same line as previous one but is more of a reasoning book as compared to that by Wells. The author tries to unravel events arguing why things today are as they are.
• Glimpses of World History- Nehru: This is a real big collection of letters written from prison to Indira Gandhi. Being letters, the content is most like one-to-one conversation (though we see only the teaching side) but still speaks about history in a number of dimensions. I am reading this one right now.

With such books nowadays, I really see the history curriculum we had as mere waste of time. Such a fine topic, if taught with the right attitude, can attract a majority of people and not seem “boring”.