Indian Writing

- Sharanya Manivannan points me to news about Paula Gunn Allen who was recuperating from radiation treatment for lung cancer when a fire destroyed her possessions. Details here.

“Snowflakes, leaves, humans, plants, raindrops, stars, molecules, microscopic entities all come in communities. The singular cannot in reality exist.” - Paula Gunn Allen.

- Here is a review of a new memoir about cancer including the history and science of the disease.

Sidney Farber’s refusal to stop injecting crude folic acid antagonists into children with leukemia at Boston Children’s Hospital in the late 1940s seems cruel — the horrific side effects made his colleagues demand that he stop and let the children die in peace — but Wishart makes it clear that without Farber’s coldheartedness, we would not have modern chemotherapy. The unpleasant truth of medical progress is that other people have suffered so that we may not.

- Farewell, Angela King.

- New developments in cancer care in Kolkata.

- Cancer survivors in Chennai.

- A hospice in Sri Lanka.

A lower court had apparently held that a sex worker could not be called an ‘honest woman’, and that her testimony as witness in a murder case was therefore unreliable.

Fortunately the High Court, quashing the lower court ruling, has upheld her testimony.