A 13-year-old girl is told her leg must be amputated.
She wanted to be a dancer.
In that moment, she could see no future.
Author Jerry Pinto sat by her bed, pulled out his phone, and played a song from Naache Mayuri — the film about Sudha Chandran, the dancer who lost a leg and danced again.
A little light broke across that young face.
That is what palliative care looks like.
Only 4% of Indians have access to reliable pain relief.
Four. Percent.
Meanwhile, India is one of the world's largest exporters of legal morphine.
We grow the medicine. We ship it abroad. Our own dying don't get it.
Let that sit for a second.
Pinto's new book — A Good Life: The Power of Palliative Care (Juggernaut, 2025) — walks straight into the wards most of us avoid.
He sat with people who already knew they were dying.
And what he found wasn't despair.
It was a strange, fierce celebration of life:
Pinto names something we all see but never say out loud.
When someone falls sick in an Indian home, someone has to do the work.
The bandages. The sponge baths. The special diet. The 3am wake-ups.
That someone is almost always a woman.
Mother. Sister. Daughter-in-law. Already stretched. Now stretched further.
"This must change," he says, "or something will snap."
His pitch to Indian men is sharp:
👉 To give care is to give love.
To give love is to not collect regrets.
Ask Pinto for a single change and he doesn't hesitate:
⚡ Every hospital — a fully-funded palliative care ward.
⚡ Every PG medical college — palliative care as a specialisation.
Kerala already proves it works. The state has pushed palliative care down to the village level — a model the rest of India still hasn't copied.
Pinto has been afraid of death his whole life.
His mother attempted suicide. Multiple times. Different methods.
Death kept making guest appearances.
Then he met a dying child who just wanted to play on the beach.
And played like he meant it.
That child taught him what no book ever could.
Pain can be seen. Indignity can be softened. And the dying, it turns out, are often the most alive people in the room.
That's all for now!
