Imbecilic Nitwits Design Idiotic Acronym

The Public Interest Bulletin by the "1%" At Mehfil Restaurant in Raidurgam, Hyderabad

Deny To Affirm

A recent re-watch of the 2006 movie “Stranger Than Fiction” was, well – a strange experience. The movie is self-referential and high on literary criticism - yet very engaging. The premise of the story is that Harold, a taxman suddenly starts to hear a voice-over reciting his life. And as it turns out, the narrator is a fiction author with writer’s block who nonetheless is famous for killing the main character in her books. Harold figures it all out along the way and meets the author in order to stop his “imminent death”. By the third act of the movie the author has finally devised a method of knocking off Harold – albeit with a “poetic” & “meaningful” death. After reading the draft - where Harold runs in front of a bus to save a young boy - Harold reconciles with his own death and accepts what is coming.

As I saw the movie, the constant thought I had in my mind was that this was a familiar tale - a man communicating with an omnipotent voice that finally convinced him to willingly accepting his own death for the “greater good”. In fact it is the most widely told tale in human history – the story of last days of Jesus. The part that conforms to this movie is of course that of Jesus’s dialogue with God, specifically - The Agony in the Garden of Gethsemane. The theology of the conversation is the content of all Good Friday sermons. But at its crux is the acceptance by Jesus that his death was necessary for a higher purpose.

A graceful last act is not always afforded to people. Imagine other living things at the end of their lives and how they die. D H Lawrence in his poem “Self-Pity” once wrote –

I never saw a wild thing
sorry for itself.
A small bird will drop frozen dead from a bough
without ever having felt sorry for itself.

An alternate form of life (a more natural form of life perhaps!) is proposed here – not only unfettered by the wallow of self-pity, but also unbound by the sentimentality in getting to the very end of life. A lack of awareness of one’s mortality, as is the case for non-humans, may help here. People on the other hand are hyper-aware of their mortality. A large number of life choices are made with that knowledge. People do altruistic acts to make the pain of leaving the stage more bearable, maybe in the belief that they can rest in the knowledge that they played their “part”. Public service and any other forms of “helping out” maybe means of finding closure and meaning. In a sense people may not mind abiding by the maxim - “What would Jesus do?” when it comes to dying. Since what the Bible says Jesus did at the end is – accept the hand dealt and died in the service of mankind.

Another famous incident on the topic of altruistic suicide is that of British Captain Lawrence Oates during an unsuccessful expedition to the South Pole in 1912. Story goes that a gravely sick Captain Oates willfully walked out of the tent into a blizzard and to certain death in order for his team to have a better chance of survival – given their dwindling rations and them having to care for him. His understated famous last words were – “I am going out and may be some time”. To qualify it as simply courageous – seems to be doing a disservice to the act. The difference between the choice that Harold or Jesus faced and that Captain Oates made is that in the case of the Captain we do not have a record of the inner reasoning that went into such a momentous decision. 

 In December 2014, news carried the story of a Chinese woman Qiu Yuanyuan - who died by opting out of chemotherapy for treating her cancer in order to give her unborn child a chance to survive. Admittedly there is an element of vicarious living here for the cynical minded. But it is also true that this form of altruistic suicide is the most commonplace and relatable of all the other instances cited above. The notion of “greater good” that is normally seen as a valid justification is modified here into the hopes and possibilities that a child brings. Therefore in this act of denial of life, there is also affirmation of life.

Tributes to Qiu Yuanyuan

Links:
"Pregnant Chinese woman with cancer dies after refusing chemo to save son" - The Hindustan Times
"Antarctic mission: Who was Captain Lawrence Oates?" - BBC News