In India’s evolving dialogue on death with dignity, some lives compel us to pause and reflect—not because of how they ended, but because of how they endured.

One such life is that of Aruna Shanbaug, who was left in a permanent vegetative state after a brutal sexual assault in 1973, at the age of 25. For over four decades, she remained confined to a hospital bed in the very institution where she had once worked. It is such cases—where the probability of recovery is negligible or absent, and where the small, defining experiences that give life its texture are no longer accessible—that compel us to confront difficult questions about the meaning of life itself.In 2011, a journalist-activist approached the Supreme Court in Aruna Ramchandra Shanbaug v. Union of India (2011), seeking permission for........

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