The campaign launched by Indian Association of Palliative Care was the brainchild of Medulla, an agency that focuses on medical care
"Death is nothing, but the next great adventure," said Albus Dumbledore to a 11-year-old Harry Potter. In this reporter's opinion, that is one of JK Rowling's best lines in the entire book series. And yet, we're not comfortable talking about death. When a loved one speaks on life after their time, we ask them to change the topic. A few of us joke about death, but not everyone sees humour in it. And then two days ago, The Indian Association of Palliative Care (IAPC), today, launched a new public awareness campaign on palliative care that helps terminally ill patients and their families laugh at death.
The video campaign that has gone viral on social media, has a group of individuals - one suffering from lung cancer, one suffering from a kidney infection and others who are spending their last months (or even days) joking about death.
One of the patients, who suffers from kidney failure, joked that he was like US President Donald Trump. "Soon, neither of us will last," he joked.
Another woman, a patient of lung cancer, asked the audience - mostly comprising family members and doctors - why they were feeling sad. "You just have a cold. I have lung cancer and I'm laughing," she said with a smile.
While speaking to DNA, Praful Akali, the founder and MD of Medulla, the agency that started this campaign, said that the idea originated last year when Medulla had a campaign called 'Last Words'. "Several nurses usually hear a terminally ill patient's last words and not their families. The idea was to promote palliative care, where terminally ill individuals spend their last days with their loved ones. From there, we met some patients, who joked about death, with some of them even wishing that they could be on stage and make jokes about it. That's how #LaughAtDeath was launched," he said.
Akali added that IAPC teamed up with some of the country’s top comedians including Kunal Kamra, Kashyap, Vinay Sharma, Punit Pania, Shriram R and Anand Reghu to sit with the patients and their families."The biggest learning we got out of it is the will power of these individuals. It sounds cliched, but when we look at them we take a step back and appreciate what really matters in life," he said.
Amit Akali, Chief Creative Officer of Medulla added that it was one of the toughest projects they had to do. "The patients made life easy for us. They opened their lives to the stand-up comics and rehearsed hard for days," he added.
Speaking to DNA Kunal Kamra, one of the stand-up comics who trained the patients, said that while the experience was fascinating, he wouldn't work with terminally-ill patients again. "It's an emotional roller-coaster, which is draining because you may never see these people again," he said.
Kamra added that the patients made the campaign successful because they were honest. "There are stand-up comics who struggle to make the audience laugh, but these people managed to do it under a minute," he said.
Dr. Mary Ann Muckaden, President of IAPC added that she hopes that with the campaign, there is an increased access to palliative care in India. "Currently, only 3% of cancer patients get even simple pain relief. Hopefully, this campaign will change that," she added.
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