Aruna's Story, My Thoughts

'Unconscious for 36 years, woman seeks SC permission for death'
Aruna Shanbaug, a woman whose fate is so fearsome that just the contrast between who she was before November 23, 1973 and what she has been since then, evokes a strange unrest in the mind.
"I met a big learned pujari who said I had a sau mein ek patrika [a rare horoscope], that I'd be a success, will live long & would go abroad..... but even if he was talking rubbish it does not matter because I know I will become known in my field’’ Aruna is believed to have said when she was a 20-something nurse.
Soon after, the woman from Karnataka was brutally sodomised by a ward boy at King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai where she worked. She was left blind, without speech and paralysed by the incident. For the past 36 years, according to newspaper reports, she has been confined to a room, in fact, a bed in a hospital. Her family today consists of the nurses and attendants who look after her.
The man who dealt that crushing blow to a bubbling, promising life probably lives unknown in some part of this same country. He is protected by the same laws that force her to continue living a life that is undignified and painful.
The law, which finds it unpleasant to rule that she should henceforth not be force-fed and should be allowed to die, did not have provisions that could nail the rapist who brought her to this vegetative state. Where is the justice in this law?
Why can we just see such stories, such incidents, feel pity for the victims and just forget about them once the channel is turned off, or once an anniversary passes?
Just the injustice of the whole debate and the need to hold it seems to take away from Aruna's right to dignity in life and death.
While we ruminate on the provisions of the law on life and death, while we examine whether her plea to not be fed amounts to killing her or not, while we argue about the powers vested in us as a society and law, Aruna lives another day dying — force-fed, in fear of what she has been through, and probably praying intensely that a certain pujari's prediction about her long life will become untrue.
And while we debate whether or not we should shun our sense of propriety as society and interfere in matters of life and death, we do nothing to make that life more worthwhile, safer or even more worthy of living.