http://epaper.navhindtimes.in/epaperarchive.aspx?pdate=2016-10-30
When A Loved One Has A Different Mind
‘Life
Flows On’, a feature film dedicated to
Global Dementia Challenge and Elderly Care, deals with lives of three dementia
patients. Much of the film is shot in Mussorie (Uttarakhand) and it stars
Indian actors Tom Alter, Satyabrat Rout, Ganjendra Verma, British actor Allegra
Dunn, Norwegian actor Astri Ghosh and French actor Michael Dieter. Directed by
Vishaal Nityanand, the film had its world premiere at the Jagran Film Festival
in Mumbai earlier this month. It is now being screened at 27 cinema halls
across the country.
Besides the delicate issue that
the film highlights, it’s Astri Ghosh’s role in the film that caught my
attention. Astri is a writer/translator based in Goa. Her Indo-Norwegian
background makes her a versatile global citizen. She has translated/written over
15 books as an outcome of her extensive work at the Henrik Ibsen Study Centre
at Oslo University, language-teaching assignments at the Ministry of Foreign
Affairs, Norway and translations of eminent Urdu/Hindi/ Norwegian texts. She
also curates the annual Jazz Festival in Delhi, led by Soli Sorabjee. Lately,
she has turned to acting, and her repertoire has expanded to include meaningful
cinema, the kind we are talking about here. The role in the film was both
creative and emotionally painful for Astri whose mother was an Alzheimer’s
patient. She says that most of the other actors also had personal stories
linked to dementia.
The film evocatively portrays
the psychological and emotional journey of Emma (Allegra Dunn) whose mother
(Astri Ghosh) is progressively degenerating, with the onset of Alzheimer’s
disease, after the death of her husband (Tom Alter). The latter appears in a
few initial scenes as an environmentalist working in Mussorie. It is after his
passing away and the worsening condition of the mother that Emma tries to find
a support system at the health services in her town. The complete absence of
any facility except diagnosis compels her to head to Delhi, where the doctor
(Satyabrat Rout) offers counselling. There is nothing much he can do other than
delineate coping mechanisms, progress of the disease and some prescriptions. In
the background, a nameless, homeless lunatic (Ganjendra Verma) affected by dementia
is shown walking the streets in front of Emma’s house. He is ridiculed and
called a madman and one day a lorry picks him up against all his struggles and
stows him away to a distant landfill, so that nobody may feel bothered and
stressed by his presence. Days later, he is found dead and frozen on a rubbish
heap. Simultaneously, Emma’s multiple trips culminate in a no-show as the
doctor who was treating her mother has become a dementia patient himself.
In his interviews, the film
maker Vishal. N said that his aim was to draw attention to the deplorable
infrastructure and support system for the terminally-ill and elderly in India.
If the well-to-do in India have no access to dignified medical structure, what
of the man on the street? They are left to die like animals. A comparison with
the western world then surfaces in the thought process. Yes, there is no doubt
that they have a much better support system in place and the weak and
differently-challenged people lead a more dignified life. Their emotional needs
of companionship with others of their ilk, participation in weekly stimulating
activities, and care facilities ensure that they lead more satisfactory lives.
The question then arises - with philosophy of spirituality and dharma in India and
other countries in the East, why do the old and disabled lead such miserable
undignified lives?
After a long meditation, yours
truly has arrived at a hypothesis. It’s the karma philosophy – the cause and
effect principle – the bedrock of the collective Indian consciousness that makes
people treat the widows, disabled and diseased, in the most abhorrent manner.
The fact that these so-called unfortunate people have got what they deserved, a
divine nemesis, makes others around them shameful and belittled to own them. “These
people are cursed and suffering is their destiny” - is the most pernicious
paradigm that people in the third world live with. Every deplorable condition
and facility (or lack of it) then originates from this mentality. People shrug
their shoulders and wash themselves of every guilt and shame in the book of
mankind with the quality of ‘PITY’. The follow-up action then can only be
charity.
On similar lines, a recently
published book ‘The Book of Light’ edited by Jerry Pinto is a compilation of
true stories of people who live with differently-challenged relatives. The
narrative abounds with accounts of hard struggles with loved-ones of a
different mind. The book came about as a follow-up exercise from Jerry’s book ‘Em
and the Big Hoom’ (a personal story about his mother who had bipolar disorder).
Can we say that the plight of these numerous families would be a different
story if the society as a whole thought differently?
Michael Foucault’s thesis which resulted in
his book ‘Madness and Civilization - History of insanity in the age of reason’
highlights the control of power structures in societies. Religion, the state
and societal control make living a jail, where people are constantly monitored
based on beliefs and constructs. Madness and so-called lunacy have, therefore,
been viewed through various societal belief–systems in different periods of history.
The book outlines that madness
was a part of neighborhoods in the medieval age. Lunatics roamed the streets and
people enjoyed light empathetic moments with them and also vested them with
some divine epiphanies. At the turn of the 17th century, tales of
darkness, evil, witches, visitations by demons drove fear into the minds of the
so-called fortunate and able people and they drove the mad (delirious,
delusional, depressed, violent) off their streets. They confined them or put them into ships
(ship of fools) which endlessly sailed the waterways around lands, till the mad
died locked in underwater cabins in the ships.
With the dawn of modernism was
born an umbrella terminology ‘mental case’ for every differently-abled mind.
The state put in place asylums, psychiatric wards, cabinets of medicines, team
of doctors and research students to monitor the so-called ill. Foucault terms
this arrangement as another form of imprisonment from the prison to a
psychiatric ward. At the end of his book, he brings in the idea of ‘art and
madness.’ Van Gogh, Antonin Artaud, Gerard de Nerval are examples of mad artists
who created praiseworthy artistic works. His central argument rests on the idea that modern medicine
and psychiatry fail to listen to the voice of unreason and the mad. Neither
medicine nor psycho-analysis offers a chance of understanding unreason. To do
this, we need to look to the work of "mad" authors such as Nietzsche,
Nerval and Artaud. Unreason exists below the surface of modern society, only
occasionally breaking through in such works.
Ship of fools, confinement,
pariah treatment, psychiatric wards, indifference, hatred, fear, neglect and
shame are not the answer. These societal perceptions only worsen the situation.
The story of madness exists, in some form, in every household. The solution,
maybe, lies in answering the question – “How do you define normal?” A
well-reasoned and holistic treatment of the subject will restore the dignity of
the differently-abled people.
