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From the Archives: On Aruna Shanbaug’s death anniversary

May 18th, 2015:

I was just fiddling with my phone earlier today, when the news flashed on its screen “Aruna Shanbaug dies after being in coma for 42 years”.

My hands froze and my mind went numb. It has been hours since then, and that feeling has still not completely passed.

A little background, for those who are not aware of the case.

~~Aruna Shanbaug was a former nurse at the King Edward Memorial Hospital, Mumbai. She was sexually assaulted by a ward boy, Sohanlal Bhartha Walmiki and had been in a vegetative state since the assault………………Sohanlal attacked her while she was changing clothes in the hospital basement. He choked her with a dog chain and sodomized her. The asphyxiation cut off oxygen supply to her brain, resulting in brain stem contusion injury and cervical cord injury apart from leaving her cortically blind. The police case was registered as a case of robbery and attempted murder on account of the concealment of anal rape by the doctors under the instructions of the Dean of KEM, Dr. Deshpande, perhaps to avoid the social rejection of the victim, and her impending marriage. Sohanlal was caught and convicted, and served two concurrent seven-year sentences for assault and robbery, neither for rape or sexual molestation, nor for the “unnatural sexual offence” (which could have got him a ten-year sentence by itself).……………..On 24 January 2011, after she had been in this status for 37 years, the Supreme Court of India responded to the plea for euthanasia filed by Aruna’s friend journalist Pinki Virani, by setting up a medical panel to examine her. The court turned down the mercy killing petition on 7 March 2011. She passed away on 18 May 2015, after being comatose for 42 years.~~ (Source: Wikipedia.org)

By the way, Sohanlal did seven years of jail time and started a new life, most probably with a new name while Aruna spent 42 years awaiting a death which refused to oblige her. Some believe Sohanlal even got a job in some hospital in New Delhi. I read somewhere, that the police do not even have an updated picture of him to share with the general public to warn them. Which means he is a nameless and faceless man who once committed a gruesome crime; and one you could possibly have shared the elevator with on your visit to the hospital last week.

I dare you to try and get some sleep tonight.

And when you fail to, you would sit up, stare blankly into the darkness that engulfs your bedroom and ask you the same question you might have asked yourselves, many a times before. “What kind of a world do we live in?”

The answer is excruciating, singeing, but very simple. We live in the world we create for ourselves.

I am still quite disturbed to write most of what I want to write, so I am just going to share here, an article which I wrote a few days after the Nirbhaya Incident.

Much of that applies here to. Sadly, it applies to a lot of things around us. And yet, we so easily ignore such a pervasive answer because accepting it would mean we would also need to act on it.

Perhaps, we deserve the world we live in.

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