Fodder for essay.

HUMAN ACT OF TRANSCENDENCE

The picture of hundreds of people lining the road showering marigold petals on an ambulance as it sped past on an empty road in Vijayawada, during daytime, brought tears to my eyes. I was puzzled by this strange emotion, unprepared for the tears welling up within me however fleeting they may have been. To see hundreds of people showering marigold flowers on an ambulance, led by a pilot car whose siren announced the urgency of its purpose, was difficult to explain. Something very special was taking place, something the people seemed to collectively understand and endorse. With their marigold flowers, they had come to salute and confer a sacred status on the passing ambulance. In it was the heart of a young man who had just been declared brain dead and whose family, after a brief period of counselling, in a supreme act of humanity, gifted it to another human being. For someone to perform such an act of humanity, at a time when they are struggling with the pain of loss, is an act of transcendence that only the gods can understand. And perhaps even they cannot.

Was it the sense of humility that the story produced in me when I reflected on the gesture of a sister donating the heart of her loving brother to a complete stranger? Was it some deeper understanding of the meaning of life that she had, or perhaps some spiritual feeling of human oneness, that produced such a selfless act? Was there no anger at life’s irony that another can live because one’s loved one has died? Or envy or even self-pity? Where did these emotions go? Did the sister see, in the gift, her brother living on? While that seems a credible explanation, the gesture in fact says much more. Saving the life of another also appeared to count. I wondered if I was humbled by the spectacle of the “collective will” in action as people stepped out of the path of the ambulance, and waited on the side of the road so that it would not be delayed even for a second. The marigold petals being showered on a heart that was not beating, but that contained the gift of life, had something metaphysical about it. I needed to pursue these thoughts a little more.

THE GREEN CORRIDOR FOR THE HEART TRANSPALNT

I did a Google search with the words “green corridor for heart transplant” and was amazed at the stories that appeared on my screen. Chennai. Bengaluru. Vijayawada. Hyderabad. Hearts donated by grieving relatives, harvested in one place and taken to another to bring relief to an anxious family. A heart carried from one hospital to another, in Chennai during peak time, in 21 minutes on a route that normally took more than an hour, ending in a successful transplant. A heart being airlifted from Bengaluru to Chennai in record time to save the life of a woman whose own heart was fading. From the Internet, one read of many cases, within a city, and in some instances across two States, as families, counsellors, hospitals, doctors, ambulance staff, airport authorities, aircraft crew, city authorities, police and the commuting public, cooperated to make the heart transplant a success. The green corridor worked

The first is the counsellors at the hospital who assist the grieving relatives to bear their loss and also to think about allowing the cadaver to be harvested for its organs so that another can live. This requires not just courage, but also deep empathy, to approach a family in the middle of its sorrow and to ask its members to consider the donation of the heart of the loved one, who has just been declared brain dead, to another. For the family to give up the hope that the loved one will live again, to accept death, and then to think about a gift of the heart to another is an act of spirituality that every priest, of every religion, must talk endlessly about. The counsellor’s job is perhaps the hardest in the world. Yet, some people opt for it because of a commitment to humanity. The families of the deceased, in their act of giving, display a quality of sprit that can both humble and elevate us. Many vipassana camps may not be enough to comprehend the enormity of the gesture.

The system’s response

The second aspect is the hospital authorities and the relevant government body tasked to ensure that the organ donation and transplant are legal. The emergence of a system which ensures that the donation is without coercion or inducement, which coordinates with the various hospitals involved in the transplant, which maintains a database of needy patients so that various persons can benefit from the donation of multiple organs, which communicates the possibility of such a donation to the receiving hospitals, which does this in a short time frame, since time is of the essence, in other words a system that removes all the constraints for the transplant to be successful, is a system that we must salute.

Let us now look at all these elements together. There are no caste, community, or gender biases here. None of India’s prejudices can be seen in this act of giving life to total strangers. What we see instead is the other as part of the self. How different from the politics of today where the other is regarded as a hostile other, to be hated and excluded from our public life. Will this expression of fraternity become a movement and replace the politics of hate that is today being sown?

 I remember reading, several years ago, of an elderly upper caste gentleman in Bengaluru who had been hit by a car when on his evening walk, who wept when he had been told that the person — who had travelled many miles on his scooter at night, after the hospital had called the latter and asked him to donate his blood belonging to a rare group — was a gentleman who belonged to a community that he had maligned all his life. The old man wept for a wasted life. 

Why is it, I wondered, that we can receive blood and a heart from another, without worrying about caste, creed or gender, but we cannot wear another’s skull cap?

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