Goethe Zentrum Panel Discussion On Death

HYDERABAD: What happens when a city that loves talking about films and food sits down to talk about death? “If we are to deal with something, we have to be able to talk about it, and we do not even use the word ‘death’,” said Amita Desai, founder director of Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad.

Goethe-Zentrum Hyderabad will host a two-day programme on November 29 and 30, ‘Living and Dying Consciously – In Peace and Dignity’, which places death as a part of a public conversation. The panels on November 29 will have philosopher Devasia Muruppath Antony, ethnologist-author Jyoti Marianne Bahri, medical historian Urvi Desai, elder-care practitioner Sundar Bunga, and medical anthropologist Hardik Dua, followed by a two-day workshop led by Bahri and vocalist-writer Vidya Rao.

Desai told Deccan Chronicle that the idea grew out of her own encounters with loss and caregiving. “The minute you’re born, we know that we will die. These are the two realities of life that coexist through the entire process,” she said. “We felt we have to talk about living and dying in the context of death itself. Death is when the meter stops, but one leads up to that point, the long period where one is living and possibly also dying.”

According to Desai, the first step is to stop hiding behind soft language. “We take the concept of death as taboo,” she said. “To talk about it is to begin to deal with it.” She links that public silence to very personal questions that surface around hospital beds and in family homes about how to lend dignity to those last months, how to keep “life till the very last moment” for someone who can no longer walk, speak or care for themselves.

If Desai stands in the world of art, caregiving and public culture, philosopher Devasia Muruppath Antony provides the conceptual spine of the second panel. A professor of philosophy at Hindu College, University of Delhi, he has spent years thinking about consciousness, religion and ecology.

“My point would be to see life and death not as opposite binaries, but as life as death, death as life,” he told Deccan Chronicle. Modern life, he argues, honours only one slice of our awareness. “Modernity celebrates only the waking mode of our consciousness. When I say my life is only this waking mode, I am cutting it to pieces.”

He draws examples from both science and scripture. In molecular biology, he said, apoptosis shows how programmed cell death makes new life possible. “Every day in my body some cells die and that gives rise to new cells,” he said. Spiritual texts, from the Upanishads to the Buddha, treat waking, dreaming and deep sleep as three modes of one consciousness. “The opposite of life is murder and not death,” he concludes.

They will be joined by Sundar Bunga, founder of Lean On Elder Care and co-founder of SERA India, whose work centres on helping older adults “live and leave with dignity, comfort, and purpose”. Hardik Dua, Advocacy Officer (Health) at the Vidhi Centre for Legal Policy, brings the legal and social dimensions of end-of-life care. Dua’s work spans advance care planning, Do Not Attempt Resuscitation orders, the “Good to Go” death-literacy festival, and even a manual on estate planning for LGBTQIA+ people. “