Shah-e-Tara Jasrotia, 64, flaunts a few words in faded green across her arm. It is a tattoo, she says, I got it years ago. Squint a little, go closer, and the text in Devnagri script on her shrivelled skin begins to gain legibility.
This June, G. Naveen Kumar would have joined a well-known private company as a trainee after being selected recently through a placement programme at his college PSG College of Technology in Coimbatore. Naveen's Facebook profile photo has the logo of the company he was to join and this speaks of the expectation this 22-year-old had of a career.
At least one-fourth of more than 19,000 police officers in the city, including commissioner J K Tripathy, have pledged their organs for donation.
Organs of a 15-year old boy, who was declared brain dead on Saturday, were donated to various hospitals in the State.
You meet these men and women mostly in grim settings. Hospitals have always been about harsh lights, sombre green walls, and a doctor in a white coat holding a stethoscope. Or even a scalpel.
It was just another awareness raising event, this time for organ donation. 'Donate life.. celebrate life...spread the word' said the press release. Usually events to raise awareness about organ donation are held at hospitals but this one was ironically at the fancy Lodi garden restaurant. I went along because the evening promised a showing of snippets of a film on organ donation, The Ship of Theseus, to be premiered at the Cannes film festival.
Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit signed a pledge board on organ donation at an event held in the national capital on Wednesday by MOHAN Foundation (Multi Organ Harvesting Aid Network), a not-for-profit organisation working to create awareness. Several leading doctors also joined her in the pledge.
In less than a month, about 13,000 IT professionals, doctors, policemen and healthcare workers pledged their organs in a donation drive, Daan (Donate Organ, Donate Life), jointly organized by HCL Technologies Ltd, Apollo Group of Hospitals and Chennai Police in association with Indian Medical
As an interior designer, 54-year-old Kishore Jain infused life in the homes of his clients. He would have liked to have continued doing so. But he breathed his last in February after waiting for four years for a donor to help him fight heptacellular carcinoma, a form of liver cancer.
This year, on World Kidney Day on Thursday, healthcare workers in city are planning programmes to felicitate women - not just because it is also Women's Day, but also because women have been rated to be more altruistic as organ donors than men.
