As I have watched mass hysteria build up over Anna Hazare’s fast, there have been moments when I felt that his supporters had forgotten that India is a democratic country. I have long believed that the most apolitical Indians are those who belong to the English speaking, tweeting, texting middle classes but I had no idea just how apolitical they were till last week. Without reading the Jan Lokpal bill...

Leprosy has officially been eliminated in India, yet 130,000 new cases are diagnosed every year. Richard Cookson and Seyi Rhodes report on the plight of the patients shunned by society Narsappa was just 10 years old when he was told he had leprosy, but the news changed the course of his life forever. People in his Indian village immediately began to shun him and told his parents that he had to...

THIRTY-EIGHT years ago, Aruna Shanbaug, a nurse working at the King Edward Memorial Hospital in Mumbai, was sexually assaulted and strangled by a sweeper. The attack caused severe brain damage and left Aruna in a persistent vegetative state. The former nurse is looked after by a team of doctors and nurses at KEM. According to several reports, Aruna cannot move or see. She just lies in a comatose state in...

As intermittent jubilation spreads through the crowd of 5,000-odd farmers at Moti Buru, outskirts of Ahmedabad, where the 'Jal, Jameen Jungle bachao padyatra' was on Saturday, Dr Kanubhai Kalsariya is quick to assert that this is not the final victory and that the fortnight-long yatra will continue till Gandhinagar as per schedule. The people's mass protest that has brought them this victory is spectacular in its own right. Fatigued from the...

Let Aruna die? No, with her alive, there’s more power, media attention. Hence, the politics of mercy in medicine. Lucknow airport. Late ’90s. Khushwant Singh and I are waiting for our flights, we talk about Prime Minister A.B. Vajpayee mentioning my book Once Was Bombay in a speech on collapsing cities. He suddenly asks, “You wrote that book on the woman who neither lives nor dies, you still see her?” I...