'when de dead delights de living'
prologue
'let laughter cease
let conversation flee
this is where the dead suffers to delight the living'
Theese are the words adourning the walls of the dissection hall of my medschool which houses both virgin medicos and menopaused cadavers alike.
For past so many days,i have been comptemplating with myself on the question of identity of the people i meet everyday,living and dead,or else half living and half dead.
A cadaver(a dead corpse put up for dissection studies) neither seems to fit into any of the above categories nor qualifies to carve a category of its own.
The imbroglio i have engulfed myself seems to drive me inquisitively insane so much that i no longer feel amalgamated to where i belong.
A lot more dead,a bit less killed and never ever buried,its(his) identity was shunting my brain to hallucinable levels of herculean magnitude.
The facade of identity is pandemoniously swappy as each man is a prisoner of dreams of others and rarely his.And defining one for the dead is all the more crazier.
Any astrologer would have overlooked many a mile on predicting the poor soul's future and people who speak on life after death will be dumb on what a cadavers fate is at the hands of God and doors of heaven............
Which heaven??? Whoose God???
Ram,Christ or Allah!!!!!!!
The case of a soul whoose ashes never polluted Ganges,never raised sandal smoke or wasted a 6 ft cemetry space may not interest many a God.
When answer to life after may tactically run off without an answer ,the question of rebirth is certainly out of the portfolio.
If given a chance,the man in his all conscious mind would never charter him a human life, i presume.
The lost identity of the dead man is no ones fault.If the news of your death or no news of your life does not interest the blood you leave behind,your identity is naturally at stake and even you might end up as a cadaver.
An unclaimed corpse after being deserted in the mortuary for the stipulated time is set aside for the medicos after the legal procedures and the formalin treatment assures that the corpse 'lives' for next one year.And this formalin treatment is the sole reason this unclaimed unburied corpse can claim any identity if so ever.
For me ,the difference between life and death is all about identity.
With soul and mind not counting, it is his body which still makes me believe he still commands life.It virtually lives with us all through the 1st year of our course.
My job is to kill him after he is dead and build my brain at the cost of the murder.It is arguable if i really feed my brain of any worthwhile anatomy lessons with this one year ordeal.
I see him being stripped of his limbs,heart,lungs and brain virtually pacing up the loss of his identity.
Each cunningham volume (the dissection manual) gobbles up one-third of de palate of little identity left with the man that too maintained by aged muscles and ruptured bones fastly giving way to the greedy scalpel.
The cherry on the top of the sadism is claimed by the callous act of castration of his manhood well preceeded by sexist comments of the gifted gabs.
A typical indian medico starts his dissection work from day 1 itself and virtually lives with it for the first one year.And any medical professional can trace back his days at the dissection table.
The ultimate friendships and the intense sagas of friendships start here.If it means that a dead man is the cause of a flock of medicos finding their best friends and first fiance,that is quite musing.
The ultimate identity a cadaver can claim and nurture is as a talisman who suffers to alleviate the suffereings of the human race he too was once apart of.
The most despondent fact is the way that this identity has trivialised by many of us who can never appreciate the life that lived in the man lying in front of us.
A monument need not be erected nor a ballad be composed to appreciate this service.
Only if we could rediscover that he too once lived just like you or me does now,we would be doing much more in redefining his undefined identity.
epilogue
Nawab rajendran ,one of prominent social voices of the last decade after his death had donated his eyes and his body to Trivandrum medical college for the study of medicos.A protest has now erupted against the authorities who then buried his body without actually using it for dissection studies.
A corpse with news value and glorified identity is not always the first choice.In a medical college where hundreds die unclaimed ever year,a voluntary donor is not always coveted.After all, we need just 10 an academic year for our scalpels.
00:45July 27,2008
rjV PROCLAIMED
rjvachas.blogspot.com
my bro 2 iz a medico nw @ calicut medical college n he ll start his cadaver work a week 4m nw. BOL! lil bro!!
