Ripples on the brain

To somebody I know…I wish I could tell him directly…

Oh! this was funny. It was in 9th or 10th standard that we read about “The Policy of Appeasement” in our history books. Appeasement was a very amusing term for many of us and we spent quite sometime understanding what it was.

After that, this is the first time I think I’m hearing the term “appeasement”, thanks to Bush’s remark in Israel. As if that was not interesting enough, we have this funny interview that I’ve watched atleast half a dozen times now. The interviewee, Kevin James, is asked a simple question, “What did Chamberlain do?”. Not that I knew the answer to that question before watching that video, but a guy who spews as much as rhetoric as Kevin James does, he should have known atleast some background on appeasement.

That guy tries to beat around the bush for sometime (count how many times he says “energize, legitimize”; very funny, not very different from how I used to attempt answering 12 mark questions I had no clue about during my engineering college days ) before finally admitting he doesn’t know the answer. But that doesn’t give him any respite as he’s totally flayed by the host. Poor guy decides to scream continuously to avoid further embarrasment, but doesn’t succeed.

For MSNBC, this create an “alwaa sapdara mathiri” effect. They have already shown this episode twice this evening.

Courtesy: Gaurav Sabnis

This should have happened sometime last August. I was at my niece’s day care centre along with my mom. We had gone there to pick my niece up. My mom goes there daily, so the manager (an old man) knew her pretty well. I was actually there for the first time.

As we picked her up, the old man asked my niece pointing at me, “Ithu yaaru ma? unnoda mamava, chiththappava, athimbera? (Who’s this? Your maternal uncle or dad’s brother or dad’s sister’s husband?)”.

“Mama (Maternal uncle)”, I replied.

“Correcta sonnen pathiya! (See, I was spot on)”, he replied back, with a triumphant smile. I was dumbfounded!

This morning, as I was getting ready for office, my niece, who is a year and a half old, wished me on the phone. She’s just started speaking and nobody has even heard her speak these words. “Mama, Happy Birthday”, she said once. “Happy Birthday to you”, she said again. That made my day!

I also realized that having your wife’s birthday the next day after yours is not so good after all (I know I didn’t have a control over it). You can never spring a surprise or act as if you’ve forgotten hers.

Yet another one comes… This is the second time I’m in the US on my birthday…

In April 2006, five people from a University in the US were involved in a road accident. One girl survived the deadly head-on collision. Someone from the University identified the girl that was alive, but unconscious and also the other dead victims. The girl who survived was Laura Van Ryn and one of the people who were dead was identified as Whitney Cerak, another student from the University. The authorities passed on the sad news to all the families.

The Cerak family was asked to collect their daughter’s remains and the Van Ryn family was told that though their daughter was alive, they should be prepared to expect the worst, as it normally happens in such tragedies. Even then, when the reached the ICU, they were shocked to see their daughter in coma and bandaged almost from head to toe. They prepared themselves for a lengthy road to recovery and recuperation for their daughter (if she were to ever come out of coma).

While the Cerak family, as the families of other victims of the accident, held funeral service for their daughter, the Van Ryn family wondered if their daughter would have been well-off had she not survived the accident. They spoke to her, sang to her when she lay in coma. A small movement of the eye brows or lips would be greeted with joyous celebrations. After a fortnight, the hospital asked the family to take her to a rehabilitation centre. Though she was in partial coma, her condition had improved over the fortnight. She was in the rehabilitation for 3 weeks or so. In this period, her parents and sister would wheel Laura to her sessions, and again try to engage her in conversations and so on.

In this weeks after the accident the Van Ryn family noticed a lot of changes in Laura. But they were prepared to take her in whatever state she was in, as the doctors had already warned them about the same. They weren’t even sure if Laura would ever completely regain her memory as there had been a severe brain damage. They noticed that teeth arrangement had changed, she had a pretty disfigured forehead, she had lost her eye color and so on. But they also noticed that she had pierced her navel and called her boy friend Tiger, when she gained partial consciousness. Laura’s sister reasoned that she would have secretly pierced her navel during the spring break and the doctors had also warned the family that she would not be able to recognize even people very close to her. Once when her father was with Laura, he was upset to hear the words “false parents” from her. Again, when Laura’s sister was with her during one of the sessions where she was asked to write down her name, she wrote “Whitney”. When she took this to the specialists, they hypothesized that she would have picked the name just before the accident and would have stuck on to it.

Only after the last incident, did Laura’s sister really began doubting the identity of the girl her family considered their daughter. She went back and checked the names of the victims who died in the accident and identified that Whitney Cerak was indeed one of them. Unable to hold herself any further, she went back to Laura and asked her directly what her name was. “Whitney Cerak”, she said, again. That was it for Laura’s sister. She had confirmed her fears. She told Whitney, “Thank you. You will be alright pretty soon”.

The Cerak family that was trying hard to come to terms with the death of their daughter received a call late one night 5 and a half weeks after the crash from the same person that broke the news about their daughter’s death. But this time he said their daughter was alive. They couldn’t believe it. Whitney’s sister disconnected the call abruptly. However, she and her mother decided to drive late in the night for around 5 hours to check out in the rehabilitation center where the caller said Whitney was. Though both of them didn’t believe it could be Whitney, they were gripped by a strange, uncomfortable feeling of what if it were true!

When they walked into the rehabilitation center, the Van Ryn family took them to the girl they had been taking care of for the last 5 weeks. It was indeed Whitney Cerak! The Cerak family didn’t know how to react. While there were screams of joy from the mother and the sister, their confirmation also left the Van Ryn family devastated. They hadn’t realized that their daughter had died and was buried 5 weeks ago under a stone with a different name on it! Laura’s funeral was held and the Cerak family helped their daughter through her long road to recovery.

This mistaken identity episode happened because after the accident, the identification was done by a University authority. There was no scientific technique adopted to confirm the identities of the victims. The survivor was identified as Laura based on the hand bag that was found near her which had Laura’s id. The Cerak family buried the disfigured remains of what they assumed was their daughter, without looking at it as they wanted to have pleasant images of their daughter.

Whitney Cerak has almost recovered fully from the tragedy and is currently studying in Europe. After she had sufficiently recovered, she had a chance to watch her own funeral and listen to the things her family and well-wishers had to say at her funeral. The Van Ryn family felt miserable when people began asking them as to why they were not able to identify the mistaken identity even after five weeks of the accident. The Van Ryn family and the Cerak family later wrote a book titled “Mistaken Identity” on this episode.

MSCNBC aired a programme that covered this episode on a weekend in a documentary format. This went on for more than two hours I think. All through this period, I was so absorbed into this story. Even a movie screenplay couldn’t have been so incredible. The narration was interspersed with interviews with the families. The mistaken identity itself was brought only midway into the episode and it completely surprised and shocked me. Pretty unbelievable! Daily mail has a very good and long story on the episode.

I couldn’t but feel for the Van Ryn family. The moment when they actually came to know about the mistaken identity would have been very harsh on them. In fact, that was the time when smiles had returned to their faces when they witnessed their daughter slowly getting back to normal. To me, the biggest moment in this whole episode was Laura’s sister’s reaction when she heard the girl say her name “Whitney Cerak” when she wanted to double check. It would have been very difficult to react the way she did.