It was Saturday night, the first of August, and it had been raining steadily since evening in Sevagram — a soft, steady static against the study window. I was all set to deliver my talk on Google Meet.
Four minutes in, the light went out.
I was midway through a sentence when the small light panel clipped above a stack of books beside my screen simply stopped glowing. Its battery held about an hour’s charge, and it had been running through the two hours Ashwini spent setting up the room, so there was almost nothing left in it by the time I began speaking. My son had spent the better part of that evening getting the room ready — the tripod, the camera, the desktop, the light, the chair — moved and adjusted and moved again until he was satisfied enough to give me the go-ahead. He hadn’t gone far after that. He was a few feet away in the study, waiting in case something went wrong — and something did. He crossed the room before I had finished the thought and had the light working again within seconds. The room itself stayed ordinarily lit — the ceiling light was still on — but my face, on the screen the fifty doctors were watching, had gone dim and flat, and I sat there praying for two things at once: that the light would come back before anyone noticed, and that it would stay lit for the twenty minutes still ahead of me. Beside my chair, our golden retriever Hedo lifted his head, decided the moment did not concern him, and went back to sleep. I was seventy years old, learning — live, in front of an audience, with the rain going on outside — how a light panel and a camera work, while trying to explain to family physicians why none of us talk about death until a crisis forces the conversation on us.
It had started, as most things do now, with a video.
I had posted Dying with Dignity on YouTube on 2 June. Over the following two months it found an audience I had not expected — 175,000 views, 1,600 new subscribers, 550 comments, 300 WhatsApp forwards, fifty emails, and a scattering of phone calls from strangers who had watched it and wanted to talk. One of those calls came in the second week of July, from Dr Kamlesh Mehta in Canada. He was organising a two-day workshop for family physicians across India and wondered if I would give a twenty-minute talk on the sunset years — on ageing, on the conversations doctors have with families who are not ready to hear them. I said yes before I had worked out how I would say it.
I wrote the talk longhand first, the way I write most things, then typed it, edited it, and cut it until it ran to about 2,500 words — roughly twenty minutes read aloud, which meant it would run closer to thirty once I stopped to breathe. I divided it into five movements — The Silence Before the ICU, Why India Needs This Conversation, The Family Physician Can Change the Story, When Love Makes Decisions Difficult, and One Conversation Can Change Everything — and decided against PowerPoint. No slides, no bullet points behind me, just a man talking. It carried three stories I have almost never told in public: my sister Jiji, who lived six years with ovarian cancer and chose to die at home, surrounded by family rather than machines; my teacher Dr K. N. Ingley, who died in his nineties at home with soft bhajans playing in the next room; and Dr Sushila Nayar, the founder-director of MGIMS Sevagram. I have written and spoken about medicine for forty years. I had never quite told these three.
The technology turned out to be the harder assignment.
I did not know, until I went looking, that a talking-head video needs a proper light, so I bought a small LED panel and learned that my iPhone could double as a camera. My first rig was a dozen books stacked into a tripod, the light balanced on top and angled at my face like something improvised in a war zone. Then my son borrowed a proper camera from his department, and the iPhone went back in the drawer.
The harder problem was memory. I did not want to read from a script — nothing looks worse on video than a man reading — but I could not trust myself to hold five sections and thirty minutes of argument in my head unaided either. Ashwini’s answer was better than mine: print the outline on a single card and tape it not beside the screen but directly above it, with the camera in between, so that my eyes, glancing up to check my place, would look almost exactly where the camera expected them to.
By half past seven that night, we thought we were ready. I overran, as I always do — twenty minutes became thirty, and it was closer to eight o’clock by the time I said what I had planned to say. A three-page printout sat on my lap through all of it, and there is at least one moment on the recording where my eyes drop a second too long, reading a line I should have known by heart. I noticed it and let it go. I am not a professional speaker. No one watching was going to mark me down for glancing at my own notes while talking about death.
What followed was the unglamorous business of getting the talk onto YouTube — an education in itself, walked through step by step by Claude, who told me what to do and, more usefully, what not to. Then came the messages, to the WhatsApp groups, to Facebook, to Twitter, and the next morning to MGIMS alumni everywhere: thirty minutes, I wrote, and if you are a physician, a caregiver, or someone with ageing parents, it may be worth your time.
I keep thinking about the light going out and coming back on. At seventy, most of what I did that evening — the light panel, the tripod of books, the card taped to a screen, a voice in my ear explaining a website I had never used — would have been unthinkable to me even five years ago. I had spent the whole talk telling other doctors not to wait for a crisis to have the conversations that matter. It did not escape me, sitting there for those few seconds with my face gone dim on camera while Ashwini got the light going again, that I had just spent a fortnight refusing to wait either — not for death, but for the smaller, more ordinary courage it takes to learn something new in your eighth decade, on camera, in front of people who could see exactly how unsure of yourself you were. I enjoyed it more than I expected to. I suspect that was the point all along.
What came back after the talk went out is its own story — The Conversation Continues.