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A multidisciplinary festival in Bengaluru sensitises people about living will
Titled Good To Go Death Literacy Festival, it brings together medical professionals, lawyers, storytellers and members of NGOs to discuss the nuances of occasions when people wish to refuse to receive life-sustaining treatment if they become terminally ill
MUMBAI: A two-day multidisciplinary event is being held in Bengaluru on August 23-24 to draw people’s attention to the virtues and, indeed, the need for end of life care, and sensitise them to the Advance Medical Directive (AMD). Titled Good To Go Death Literacy Festival, it brings together medical professionals, lawyers, storytellers and members of NGOs to discuss the nuances of occasions when people wish to refuse to receive life-sustaining treatment if they become terminally ill.
This provision follows from the Supreme Court (SC) judgment on the right to die with dignity, endorsed through Article 21, and invoked through the famous Common Cause petition in 2018, where the apex court ruled that a Living Will is a fundamental right for terminally ill patients to refuse life-sustaining treatment.
One of the participants in the event, Smriti Rana, Head - WHO Collaborating Centre for Training and Policy on Access to Pain Relief, said the need for death literacy came upon Indians during the Covid-19 driven pandemic months, when “people were forced to consider their mortality”.
A pressing need, she said, is to engage in a debate and strike a balance between ‘intensive care’ vs ‘community’ when it comes to end of life care. “Good care leads to escalation of treatment (in ICUs and high-tech hospitals), which affluent groups can afford. There are others, however, who prefer to die among loved ones and within communities. What is lacking is pain management.”
Referencing the Economist Intelligence Unit’s (EIU) 2015 Quality of Death Index, she pointed out that India ranked 27 out of 80 participating countries. “Fifty-five million Indians are caught in out-of-pocket expenditure every year,” she said. “A system that is supposed to ease suffering is actually inflicting more suffering, that too when people are at their most vulnerable. Every one becomes a victim of financial toxicity because they do not have a choice.”
When people are already in a critical state, why is the system inflicting more and more tech-driven interventions, Rana queried. “The hope is to be able to normalise such discussions – it is not a terrifying doom and gloom scenario.”
Beyond workshops by doctors, the event also includes innovative ways to drive home a serious point. A telephone booth has been set up for people to speak to “deceased loved ones” where they can share their inner-most thoughts; a gallery will display curated stories of encountering death and death rituals from individuals and communities; and a central installation where attendees can pin letters and notes to loved ones they have lost. A theatrical presentation titled ‘Parting of words’ will weave poems in Hindi and English from world literature – it is being done to open a space for a dialogue about hopes, fears, feelings, and thoughts related to parting.
Additionally, Grief Circle, hosted by Mumbai-based psychotherapist Sonali Gupta, will offer space for adults to speak freely about loss, love and hope. “This is for people to be part of a space where they experience and witness each other’s journey with grief and how they work through it,” said Gupta. “The larger idea of the festival is to provide people with various mediums to process and have conversations about death. How we grieve is how we love. We need to create safe spaces for people to talk about such experiences, which are stigmatised in many pockets, as a result of which we don’t have a vocabulary.”
Films surrounding protagonists dealing with death, such as Shonali Bose’s The Sky is Pink, and Aakash Khurana’s Karwaan, will be screened as conversation pieces.
Dr Smriti Khanna, who has been running PD Hinduja Hospital’s Living Will Clinic since June 2025, helping individuals understand key aspects of making a living will, said: “Many individuals come with the thought of not wanting their families to take on the difficult burden of deciding for them, or of wanting to be in control in the last days of their life. More people should be aware of this, so that at least the taboo around conversations around death will go away,” said Dr Khanna.
Advocating medical experts’ use of social media to help spread knowledge, she added, “The Good to Go festival was envisioned for this very reason – how one can take the topic such as death and dying and normalise discussions around it. It gives people a safe space to exchange ideas in an overall festive air.”
One of Mumbai’s top neurologists Dr Roopkumar Gursahani, who heads Hinduja hospital’s neurology department, said, “We are testing the waters with this event, with the hope that it can be replicated in other cities.” He said that despite the SC ruling, the idea around life-sustaining treatment “still requires awareness so that people can make the right decisions for themselves – in order to know how to negotiate with the healthcare system, you should know its limits”.
