4 - Sunday, November 8, 1987 - North Shore News

Bob Hunter

@ strictly personal ®

THE NEWS item about the skeleton trade from India being
cut off caught my attention, all right.

The Indian government has
parsed a law banning the export of
humin skeletons. India was the
last country in the world to be in-
dulging in this grotesque business,
with an estimated 50,000 skeletons
being exported, nearly a_ third
coming from the bodies of children
who died in poor, heavi-
ly-populated areas.

The Indian ‘‘bone traders,”’ as
they were known, were grossing —
no pun — $6 million a year. It was
all supposed to be on the up-and-
up, with bodies being purchased
f-om police and hospital morgues,
as though that guaranteed
anything in a country where wives
are often incinerated so a new wife
and dowry can be acquired.

Stories, of course, circulated
about bodies being snatched from
cremation grounds and the strects
where they died.

Also rivers, after they had been
dumped during religious rites to
float off to their next incarnation
— which, it turned out, would
quite possibly be as a_ wired-
together dancing bones act in
North America.

Of course, the legitimate trade in
skeletons was supposed to be to
medical schools and universities
alone. It wasn’t.

I had the weird experience a
couple of years ago of stumbling
across several human skeletons on
a movie set in Burnaby. It was
during the filming of Spacebunter,
actually.

The doctor I was touring the set
with explained with a wonderful
sense of black humor that they had
probably been gurus in India be-
fore this.

We both thought that funny —a
reaction to the media caricature of
a Hindu guru which had been
promulgated throughout the West.

‘Nevertheless, | had to pause for
a.moment to consider the ultimate
indignity of this.

Maybe actual gurus deserve to
have their bones shipped off to the
other side of the world to be used
as props in a Grade-B sci-fi flick,
but the truth no doubt was that
these were poor, starving men or
women whose bodies had been
grabbed from the gutter before
they could get cold, hauled off
somewhere and dipped in acid to
get rid of the flesh, and fixed up
with wire for export.

At worst — relatively speaking
— they belonged to some devout
fellow who'd worked and scrimped

t

all his life to provide for his family
and who might even have been
loved by all of them to the extent
that they went to the trouble of
giving him an orthodox burial in
the River Ganges.

Call it superstitious dread, call it
atavism, but I didn’t like looking
down at those skeletons from India
one bit. This was real obscenity.

To clack those bones around in
a shoddy movie, probably playing
for laughs as much as horror, was
appallingly tasteless, if nothing
else.

I'm a guy who finds people
wearing furs to be disgustingly
barbaric and under-evolved. You
can imagine what I thought about
this macabre display of prostituted
calcium.

These were the remains of the
lost, the damned, the deserted, the
devout — alike subjected to a kind
of ongoing necromanical rape.

So when I read the other day
that the collapse of the human
skeleton trade was forcing medical
schools to replace their bones with
plastic, I cheered. About time!

It was an odd thing to read that
Dr. Charles Slonecker of UBC was
upset about this, worried that his
students might have less respect for
their patients as a result.

Quoth he: ‘‘My concern is that
the students will develop a
‘plastic’ attitude toward the human
body that may carry down to the
patient.””

Give me a break, doc!

If the use of human skeletons
ripped off from the streets of
Calcutta was going to teach your
students anything, it would be
disregard for the value of human
life. It would teach them, if
nothing else, hypocrisy.

On the one hand, an insured
North American life is worth as
much as you can bill the governm-
ent for it — but 2 pauper in India
is so worthless his reaains can be
sold for a few bucks. What kind of
lesson is that anyway?
Doctors and nurses pick up enough
sick humor during their training to
last them a lifetime, as it is. After
all, they are dealing in death and
disease and maiming. Purely as a
defence mechanism, I’m sure they
all learn to distance themselves a
bit from their patients, perhaps
even from humanity at large.

The skeleton trade was a
disgusting biz. Use plastic, doc.
Get used to it.

HAT: Use #64

*-| With the temperature in Egypt at nearly 50°C,
:{ Shelley Saywells film crew found their Tilleys “just
as important as the water bottles”. Deborah
4 Parkes discovered Use #64 ~ the Hat as a
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Q: You did WHAT with a Tilley Hat? :
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basket. It didn't work as a pillow cover, minnow
net, or as a spaghetti strainer... The Hats are
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