Rituals vs. Modern Day Energy

Disclaimer: Highly orthodox people might find this post offensive. A good idea would be to quit this post right now if you are one.

On my last day at work, just before leaving for India on vacations this time, I had a rather interesting conversation with a colleague over coffee at work. We were discussing the pros and cons of the Church tax being imposed on salaries for Christians in Germany. Suddenly, my colleague asked me about the process of performing the last rites of a person in India. I tried to explain him the different rituals we have in India based on the different religions. Like the Zoroastrians give away to body to sun and vultures in the Tower of Silence, the Christians and Muslims bury their dead ones, the Hindus and Sikhs perform the cremation either in automatic crematoriums or on wooden pyres in open-air.

Just like me, this colleague of mine takes a keen interest in world history. We also share a common interest of knowing and learning different cultures of the world. So, when my colleague heard about my above explanation, he was particularly intrigued by the Hindu and Sikh open-air cremation process. After thinking for a while, he came back to me and said he had a great idea. He is well aware of the energy problems in India and knows about all the power cuts we have on a regular basis. He also knows that the majority population in India follows Hinduism. He therefore suggested very casually, that why people in India don’t perform this open-air cremation in a more controlled fashion. He said that given the number of people dead everyday in a country of more than a billion people, there might be a lot of wood being burned for these funeral pyres. Moreover, since the human body also releases energy on being burned, all this energy can be used to generate energy or power like in a power plant.

Hearing such out of the box suggestions, I was a bit taken back and frankly speaking a little flabbergasted. My immediate reaction was to ask him if he had lost his mind. He replied very formally that he was serious. I said to him that any mention of this idea in India might be faced by a big backlash by the orthodox community. I further said that this might not be possible in India. He asked authoritatively, why not? What is the problem? I had to explain him that the last rituals for a dead person are considered very sacred by many people and the loved ones of such people might not like to hear or see such a cremation being used to commercially produce power or electricity. He looked confused and asked back, is it not a virtue of major religions in India of helping other fellow human beings. What could be more rewarding than serving humanity even when you are gone? I could not really answer all his questions. I was myself confused between morality, religion, rituals and the modernization for the sake of energy. I was not able to take any side with complete conviction. He still insisted that it is a great idea and wondered why it had not been already implemented in India.

Two days after the discussion, I was supposed to leave for vacations to India. My Air India flight got canceled due to the strike and I was stuck at Frankfurt airport for a long time. That discussion I had with my colleague had still not left me and was still there at the back of my mind. So, just to kill time at the airport, I decided to dig in further on the topic.

I googled whether this idea is already implemented somewhere in India or any place else in the world. As expected, I could not find any information for such methods in India but I found a similar thing being proposed in a county of UK. It stated: Dead bodies to be burned to heat UK Swimming Pool. Frankly speaking, I was pretty amazed to read the article on the same since I had never expected it to happen in my wildest dreams. My curiosity took me to various online debates on the same topic and for this implementation in the UK. Clearly, there were two parties both in favor and against. I encountered some really challenging and thought provoking ideas and questions in those debates.

After being convinced about the feasibility of such an implementation somewhere in the world made me dig deeper. I got more curious if such an idea for India really made any sense from practical point of view. So, I decided to run upon some numbers. I made some quick calculations from data collected from Wikipedia and the internet. I cannot say for sure how correct are my calculations since I am not a mathematics guy or a power plant expert. If anyone could cross check these calculations, I would be glad to hear from you even if they don’t make any sense. So, here are some quick and dirty calculations:

Number of deaths per minute in India: 10

Number of cremations per day: 8 * 60 * 24 = 11,520 [Assuming 8 out of 10 people are cremated on an average, 60 mins in an hours and 24 hours in a day]

Average amount of wood needed for 1 cremation: 300 kg

1 kg of wood produces: 3-4 kwh [1 kwh = 3.6 * 10⁶ Joules of energy]

Energy generated from 1 cremation: 300 * 3 kwh = 900 kwh

Energy generated from the total number of cremations per day: 900 * 11,520 kwh = 10,368,000 kwh = 10⁷ kwh [rounding off for easy calculations]

1 MW power plant produces per month: 10⁶ kwh

There are some power plants (diesel based) with approximately similar capacities as mentioned above [Source]

All the above mentioned calculations are very rough. I have not even included any energy generated by the dead bodies themselves. So, that might even increase the total amount of energy generated. This means that the feasibility of such an idea is possible. Of course, I have left several other issues like logistics, investment etc but my main target was to see if the idea even makes sense. And the biggest issue is of morality, ethics and sentiments. Would I be okay to see a private company making profits by selling energy to the people of my country by using the funeral pyre of my loved one at the end of the day ? I am still looking for an answer to that !

Heck of a Weekend !

I live a very moderate kind of life. Nothing like live-life-king-size and I like it that way. My friend circle also consist of such like minded people. So, usually there is nothing dramatic happening around me. Of course, my level of understanding people is constantly declining which lead to surprises every now and then but still it is not close to what happened last weekend.

A friend of mine living in the same town as me called on Saturday morning (last week) and asked if I could drive him immediately to the town of Regensburg which is around 500 kms from our city. He didn't had a driving license and taking a train or flight would take more time. A friend of his had taken about 100 paracetamol tablets in batches of 50 in a span of 10 minutes, the night before (reasons not known). He was now in the hospital struggling for his life. As soon as I heard that, frankly speaking I was at loss of words and also emotions. I felt like laughing at this since I believed such things only happened in Bollywood. So, I asked my friend if he was kidding. Hearing the seriousness in his tone, I quickly realized that things were pretty nasty. The guy was seriously struggling for life since his liver was failing and needed a transplant. Kidney was next in line.

Without loosing any time, I packed some clothes, picked up my friend from his place and off we were to Regensburg. I had met this guy previously on one or two occasions before at some get-together parties. So, I vaguely knew who he was. The mood on the way was tensed. There was hardly any talking except preparing ourselves for the worst. At times, we were trying to narrow down the reasons which could have made him take such drastic steps. He came from a well off family, is the only son, had a decent education and job. So, we could not make out any logical reasons behind his actions. In the end, we gave up and concentrated our energies on what was about to come next.

The scene when we arrived at the hospital was pretty crazy. The guy was in ICU and really struggling to survive. He was in so much pain that he even told us it would have been easier to die than to end up like this. We tried our best to console him and stayed by his side all the time before the doctors asked us to leave. We kept in constant touch with his parents who did not even had a passport back in India. Usually, I am a person strictly against the idea of 'jugaad' but this was one of the few times when I did not cared what means I was using to get his parents here. The only target was to get them here asap. No useful contacts were left unexploited. They arrived on Wednesday but the two days on Sunday and Monday were really crucial.

There is some sort of a liver value which under normal conditions is around 70. It was running at 14 for this guy on Saturday evening and still dropping. By early Sunday morning it dropped to 7. He was already on the list of donated liver recipients but by Sunday he was moved at the top of the list under the most critical situation. His kidneys were also failing to process the liquid intake and was close to be put on a dialysis machine. There were several other patients also in the same ICU. Two were on ventilators, one was lying with his chest still half open for the surgeries to be carried next, one was completely yellow in color and was in dialysis. There was one time when I myself was about to throw up seeing all this. I don't think I have ever seen such disturbing images with my own eyes except on TV and I always thought I had a strong stomach to see everything. That situation was proving me wrong.

Saturday and Sunday went hard, real hard. I think it was one of the longest weekends I ever had in my life. The doctors tried to gave him blood plasma but somehow his body rejected it. He got all red and developed allergies. Doctors had to counter their actions by giving some other medicines. There was always that machine used to give shock to the chest ready by his bedside. Due to the partially working kidneys, the water in his body kept pushing up to the lungs and he had trouble breathing. He was constantly having hiccups. But miraculously on Monday afternoon, things started to change. His values started to stabilize. Suddenly, there was a chance of recovery. There was time when we thought we almost lost the guy. But he was lucky. Destiny had planned something else for him. He was still in a critical situation but was recovering steadily.

Finally, his parents arrived on Wednesday and it was a tough sight for them as well. It was good that they did not saw him two days back. We took a sigh of relief and handed over the son to his parents. We were happy that we handing him over in relatively better shape. I am not sure how we would have faced the parents in case something bad happened. Anyways, we made sure the parents knew their way around and how to commute between the hospital and their apartment since me and my friend had planned to return to our city the next day.

Before returning on Thursday, we went to say him goodbyes. I could not hold myself back when he took our hands and said please don't go. Stay ! We consoled him, cracked a couple of jokes to lift his spirits and then left. We were dead tired on our way back but still the feeling of relief that all ended well was constantly providing us the energy. Finally, it was all over. A heck of a weekend !