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THE TIMES
If I had no sense of humour, I would
long ago have committed suicide.
MAHATMA GANDHI

he governments move to delete the legal statute that criminalises

attempted suicide is a welcome step forward in a heated and
seemingly interminable legal debate that has raged at least
since 1981. That was when Delhi high court first condemned Section
309 of the Indian Penal Code as unworthy of society. A two-judge
bench of the Supreme Court in 1994 went so far as to call it irrational
and cruel and hence void, before a five-judge constitutional bench
of the apex court subsequently overruled these judgments and
reinstated the law in the 1996 Gian Kaur vs State of Punjab case. The
governments landmark decision not to treat attempted suicides as
crimes is a sensitive and humane step.
In a country where suicides have emerged as the second highest
cause of deaths, this was a much-needed legal corrective. The Law
Commission has repeatedly argued in favour of this, saying in 2008
that people who try and take their lives
need compassion and emotional support. Decriminalisation would make it
easier for all of us to extend our hands
and support in reducing suicides in India. This paper has consistently advocated in favour of this position and in
support of euthanasia as long as it is uncoerced. As the Supreme Court held in
1994, the right to life and liberty, under
Article 21 of the Constitution, must also
be interpreted to include the right to die.
Internationally, France was the first
country to decriminalise attempted
suicide after the French Revolution. All European and North American countries subsequently followed suit and India is now catching
up. But thats only relatively speaking, because in another sense
Indias been here much before. Many Indic religions, such as Jainism
and Hinduism, have ancient traditions of voluntary ending of ones
life when it is seen as having served its purpose.
Now that this outdated relic of colonial law has been removed,
government must go ahead and proactively remove other illiberal
laws which get in the way of peoples lives. One such is the draconian
Section 66A of the IT Act, which makes sending any message deemed
to be offensive on any communication device a punishable offence.
Unless this is done innocent people will continue to be punished and
the justice system remain clogged.

Converting Hypocrisy
The right to convert is a religious freedom
and applies to all religions
eligious conversions have traditionally been part of the Sangh
Parivar agenda, with groups like the Bajrang Dal and VHP taking
the lead in organising ghar vapsi programmes in the belief that
Indian Muslims and Christians were once targets of forcible conversion by missionaries and madrassas. The issue has once again revived
because of the recent conversion case in Agra where Muslims have
alleged that they were offered inducements like BPL and ration cards.
Conversions can become politically charged with a BJP-led government at the Centre, while in UP the party faces charges of pushing a
Hindutva agenda on the ground by raising issues like love jihad.
The Indian Constitution allows citizens the freedom to profess,
practise and propagate their religion. Therefore, freedom to convert
or be converted whatever the inducement offered
surely remains an important democratic freedom. Yet fear of conversion has long gripped
mainstream political parties, most notably BJP.
Anti-conversion laws were passed in Orissa,
Madhya Pradesh and Andhra Pradesh as far back
as 1967, 1968 and 1978 respectively. Recently anticonversion laws have been passed in Chhattisgarh
(2000), Gujarat (2003), Himachal Pradesh (2006) and
Rajasthan (2008), three of them being BJP initiatives.
Its important to shed hypocrisy about conversions by missionaries
if Hindu organisations are allowed to go ahead with it. The ghastly
burning to death of Australian missionary Graham Staines, allegedly
because he was converting locals to Christianity, resulted in a life
term for the accused but at the time the Supreme Court also inveighed rather controversially against forcible conversion. If the
Sangh Parivar has the right to proselytise and convert then surely
other faiths and organisations do as well. There can be no such thing
as good conversions and bad conversions, just as there is no good
and bad terrorism.

Cancer survivorship is about changing mindsets and better medical care

Harmala Gupta

The chances of surviving cancer are the lowest in India. This, at

least, is what the results
of the latest global
study of the 10 most
prevalent types of cancer reveals. This
is no surprise to those of us who work in
this field. It reflects our abysmal failure
to alter mindsets and the short shrift we
have given to affordable and accessible
medical care.
It is well known that the rise in cancer survival rates in the more developed
countries is largely due to concerted
efforts at a national level to raise awareness about cancer and aggressively
screen populations at high risk. In India
such awareness and screening campaigns are few and far between and are
conducted sporadically by a handful of
NGOs and hospitals.
Consequently, we chance upon cancer rather than pick it up when it is most
curable. It is the reflection of a mindset
that would rather live in denial than
hear bad news early. While this may be a
natural reaction, it has the potential to
kill and must be overcome through well
informed and sustained campaigns.
In India, almost half of our cancers
are attributable to tobacco use. We are
no longer talking of survivorship here
but of prevention. And yet oral cancers
and cancers of the lung and oesophagus
continue to take lives. This is also true
for cancer of the uterine cervix which is
a major killer of women in rural India.
Once again, mindsets get in the way.
While tobacco, ingested or smoked,
continues to enjoy social sanction, the
human papilloma virus vaccine, which
prevents cancer of the uterine cervix,
has received bad press due to unfounded
misgivings.
To quote an oncologist: You always
want to be a few steps ahead of cancer,
never behind it. Sadly, in India, we are
several steps behind and this includes
members of the medical profession. In
villages and small towns, where the
majority of Indians live, the first stop is

usually a local practitioner or traditional

healer with scant knowledge of cancer.
Patients and families spend limited resources and pursue futile treatments
while their cancers steadily advance.
Despite the changing epidemiological picture, with diseases like cancer
more prevalent due to longevity, altered
lifestyles and environmental degradation, the situation is no better in our
larger cities. Precious time is lost as
doctors treat patients for everything
but cancer.
It is true that most cancers do not
have specific symptoms, but a clinical
examination and a thorough medical
history which covers habits, lifestyles
and diseases in the family can give
pointers. For example, it is now mandatory in the western world to first rule
out ovarian cancer for any woman who
fits the Three Fs is female, 40 and
fat when she comes to a clinic with
symptoms. The same is true for longterm smokers and men over 50 years

Chances of surviving cancer

are the lowest in India
rather than engaging with our
bodies, the emphasis is on
covering up and pretending
certain parts dont exist in the
name of avoiding shame
of age with prostate problems; cancers
of the lung and prostate must be eliminated first.
The lack of reliable and accessible
cancer treatment facilities that are affordable further compounds the issue.
The question often asked is, So, i have
cancer, now what? What indeed? Hospitals like the Tata Memorial Cancer
Institute in Mumbai are under siege
with patients and families camping
on the pavements outside. The same

Paul Rosolie isnt eaten by an anaconda

in the documentary Eaten Alive
Conservation on reality TV

A bite of Lit Lite

Arundyuti Das Basu

Decriminalising suicide is an excellent move,

government should delete other outdated laws

THE TIMES OF INDIA, NEW DELHI

THURSDAY, DECEMBER 11, 2014

Confronting The C Word

A thought for today

Goodbye Sec 309

OF IDEAS

Grotesque stunt, hurting wildlife

Renuka.Bisht
@timesgroup.com

onservationist Paul
Rosolie seems to have
set a mongoose among
the snakes with his documentary Eaten Alive, with complaints that he doesnt actually get eaten alive but escapes
after allowing himself to be
pressed, squeezed, constricted for an hour by an Amazonian anaconda. While this
complaint seems disturbingly
bloodthirsty, the other is that
the anaconda got a raw deal.
Rosolie says he
wanted to shock people into paying attention to the Amazons
endangered species. This is a
sound defence grabbing attention by grabbing eyeballs
is an honourable conservation strategy in the media age.
Fear factor has its fans
witness the popularity of reality TV gags like Worm Coffin
and Rat Pit. Why shouldnt
wildlife protectionists tap
this audience too?
Interestingly, crocodile
hunter Steve Irwin also

used to get slammed for being sensationalist. Never

mind the countless children
he got excited about reptiles,
he could never satisfy the
You dont touch nature, you
just look at it types.
Rosolies point, like
Irwins, is thats too
laidback desperate times call for desperate
measures. Hes trying to
raise consciousness about
what he perceives to be an
emergency in the Amazon,
and hes definitely got people talking about it. Eaten
Alive has turned out to be
Discoverys most watched
nature documentary in
years. Meanwhile, the anaconda is safe and getting
good healthcare.

timesview

Rudroneel.Ghosh
@timesgroup.com

aul Rosolies Eaten

Alive stunt involving an
18-foot-long anaconda is
a shameless example of sensationalism that needs to
be
condemned.
The entire stunt was carried
out to grab eyeballs and boost
TRPs. Besides, Rosolie didnt
even complete the stunt and
pulled out midway because of
safety issues. That the show
was still promoted as one in
which Rosolie gets swallowed
alive by an anaconda speaks
volumes about its real motive.
Animal rights groups such
as Peta have rightly registered
their protest against this des-

picable stunt. The giant snake

couldnt have had a pleasant
experience as Rosolie tried to
coerce it into swallowing him.
Humans arent the anacondas
natural prey. On the contrary,
the giant snake faces a threat
to its population from hunting and habitat destruction
in South Americas tropical
rainforests. Yet Rosolie saw
it fit to torture an anaconda
for publicity.
Besides, a man forcing an
anaconda to swallow him
makes for grotesque reality
television. It makes a mockery of wildlife
conservation efforts.
Rosolie
could have used
his show to highlight the
threat anacondas face from
human activities. But even if
that was his intention, the
message was lost in the
sensationalism of his stunt.
Such poor television and bizarre wildlife projects need
to be rejected before copycats start sprouting. They
neither enhance our knowledge of the animal world nor
boost conservation efforts.

counterview

dilbert

bachi.karkaria@timesgroup.com
http://blogs.timesofindia.indiatimes.com/erratica

snapjudgment
Cricket Surprise
hey say
cricket is a
great equaliser.
The statement
certainly rings
true for the J&K
cricket team that
beat 40-time
champions Mumbai in their Ranji
Trophy encounter. While Mumbai
are giants of the game, hitherto J&K
were considered minnows within
Indian cricket. But the latters victory shows the northern state has
no dearth of talent. We wont say
David beat Goliath. Who knows,
J&K could be tomorrows Goliath.

Likes Only Please

acebook and
Twitter users,
are you aware
you are entering
an echo chamber? Researchers
have found that
regular users filter out alternate
viewpoints by
relating only to
those people who share their beliefs. Maybe that is why there are so
many internet trolls around these
days, who fly into a temper and start
frothing at the mouth the moment
they encounter a viewpoint that
challenges theirs.

Breaking Free
The first people totalitarians
silence are men of ideas and
free minds...The fundamental
sense of freedom is freedom
from chains, from imprisonment, from enslavement by
others. The rest is extension of
this sense, or else metaphor.

Bachi Karkaria

erratica

The writer is founder-president, CanSupport.

Sacredspace

A spoonful of sauce makes the Litfest

go down in a most delightful way
When we first designed the Times Litfest it was a toss-up: highway or leafy lanes. Should we stick to lofty literature or take its
intersections with life? Despite purist pooh-poohing, we chose
the latter, specifically the eclectic passions of Mumbai. The
packed and back-patted fourth edition last weekend proved
that wed taken the right road.
Yes, high lit-urgy was represented by its globally ordained priesthood: Pico
Iyer, Rohinton Mistry, Neel Mukherjee, Romesh Gunesekera, Esther Freud,
Upamanyu Chatterjee, Nayomi Munaweera, Akhil Sharma, William Dalrymple
among others. There were the phenomenal FMCG writers: Chetan Bhagat,
Amish Tripathi, Devdutt Pattanaik, Ashwin Sanghi and Shobhaa De. Plus,
the Goliaths of publishing, the two Davids, Davidar and Godwin.
We had journos who daily produce literature in a hurry, but who had also
slow-cooked it: our Greek-American Keynote Arianna Huffington herself,
Guyanese-American Gaiutra Bahadur, all-American Marie Brenner, the
BBCs Sam Miller, Pakistans Saba Ali, Indias Manu Joseph...
In their books, all had explored the heroism and villainy which move across
the chequerboard of power the theme of Times Litfest 2014. But
also holding in thrall the magical Mehboob Studios were celebrated names from other mirrors of powers white and black.
Politicians Ram Jethmalani, Mani Shankar Aiyar, Salman
Khurshid and Jay Panda; sporting icons Baichung Bhutia and Viren Rasquinha;
banker Rana Kapoor and Abanti Shankarnarayanan whos raised the bar in
liquor marketings macho club; Om Puri, Dibakar Banerjee, Shekhar Kapur,
Zoya Akhtar, Rahul Bose and new kid on the blockbuster Varun Dhawan, who
discussed life in 140 characters with Twitter head Rishi Jaitly.
Fun sessions cheekily asked if Bengalis were the only anointed custodians
of angst, or if Bridget Jones now wore a choli; The three mad men Cyrus,
Kunal and Suhel were a riot. Seth solo also brought down the house with his
missiles against powers wannabes.
How many times can such a life-fest be accused of literary high treason?
The answer was blowing in the winding lines for the masti and mythology sessions sometimes longer than those for pure lit. And, yes, the reclusive Rohinton
Mistry actually sang.
***
Alec Smart said: BJP ex-minister questions Bukharis Indianness
since he still carries his Uzbek surname? So what about all the Iranis?

holds true for regional cancer centres

where there is a long queue for surgeries
and radiotherapy treatments. People
with cancer cannot wait. This is what
tips the balance further against them.
Private cancer hospitals on the other
hand are unaffordable for most people.
Nor is there assurance that you will
get the best possible or most attentive
care given the commercial ethic that
drives them.
It is said that we are our first line of
defence when it comes to cancer. Young
women and men must be taught how to
examine their breasts and testicles so
as to detect abnormalities early. This
could save lives. With breast cancer on
the rise, discovering a lump early leads
to better survival as does visiting a
doctor for a smelly vaginal discharge
which could be a precursor to cancer of
the cervix.
Once again, mindsets intrude. Rather
than engaging with our bodies, the
emphasis is on covering up and pretending certain parts dont exist in the
name of avoiding shame and protecting honour.
But perhaps the saddest statistics
are those for childhood survivorship
which in our country are almost half of
those in the developed world. These
by and large are curable cancers but
require long-term follow-up as well as
a significant amount of expenditure.
There is more to this than meets the eye.
Paediatric oncologists will tell you that
our statistics are not in line with the rest
of the world as it appears more boys
than girls get cancer. The suspicion is
that this is because the investment involved deters people from bringing
daughters for treatment. Another murderous mindset.
It is to be hoped that this recent study
on comparative survival rates will serve
as a wake-up call. While government
should initiate a nationwide screening
programme for the most prevalent cancers and invest in more affordable treatment centres, we too must meet our obligation to give cancer the stick with more
information and less prejudice.

Isaiah Berlin

Lead A Better Life, Not A Bitter Life

Discourse: Swami Sukhabodhananda

re you among those who feel

they are victims and that success is elusive? Let me say this
to you: You have to learn not to be a
victim, but a victor. You have become
victim to your psychological patterns,
your idiosyncrasies. These patterns,
so often, represent your failures,
which do not allow you to celebrate
outer success. Hence, in spite of success, you experience failures.
Reflect on this. A teacher asked students to bring few potatoes in the
school bag. Next day, each student
brought few potatoes in their school
bags. Teacher asked the students to
give each potato the name of a person
they hate. They were also told to carry
the potatoes for one week wherever
they went. After few days, the potatoes
started smelling, and soon the stink
became unbearable.
Then teacher asked, What is the
moral of this experiment? Each one

said something, and finally the

teacher said, This is exactly the
situation in life when you carry your
hatred inside your mind and heart for
long. Just as rotten potatoes spoiled
your school bag and the atmosphere,
your hatred will spoil your mind and
heart. Learn to drop your hatred as
soon as possible.
Your life, so often, is spoilt
due to your differences with
others. Differences with
others need not end up as
hatred. Differences are just
differences, but the moment
the mind gives them a name
tag of hatred mind and heart
get polluted.
No one can avoid differences, but one has to be alert
not to give the name tag and
wrap those differences with
dislike and hatred. This requires
psychological alertness. But to expect
one not to have differences at work and
home is truly being foolish.

One should drop this foolishness

by wise thinking and take practical
steps to overcome the negative
attitude.
We are so often a product of society;
human beings are social beings. We
are impacted by social expectation.
You have to be alert not to become a
slave to society, and at the same time
respect society. You have to
relate intelligently to society,
lest you become a social slave.
When you become a slave to
society, you are afraid of society. Such fear will make
your life ineffective.
With fear, you will not be
able to discern facts of life.
With fear, your perception will
be distorted. Then, instead of
the actuality of life, only the
illusion of life will be experienced. You have to drop fear. Then you
will comprehend facts as facts; otherwise fear will distort facts to fit into its
manipulations.

the

speaking
tree

Also, you tend to become victim

to your inner conclusions, inner
beliefs, and these could dominate your
life. Your mind is not free from the
victimisation by all the inner conclusions and beliefs and the external
impact of society. If you are a victim of your conclusions, then your
thinking is not free; it is bound.
Such a bound mind can never think
differently.
In management one talks of outof-the-box thinking. So you can free
yourself from conclusion and beliefs
and operate from openness. All this
needs psychological alertness, but
most of us are psychologically lazy.
We dont want to change. It is easy to
follow what has been decided. You
need strength to think differently and
not to allow fear to guide your life. You
will do business better and live a better
life rather than a bitter life.
Follow Swami Sukhabodhananda at
speakingtree.in and post your comments
there.