Excerpts inserted notes in the draft manuscript of Dilip Chitre’s forthcoming book STANDSTILL: Unfinished Requiem for a Lost Son ----which is an account of the author’s sinking into deep depression, followed by inexplicable euphoria, and a condition that was his brush with madness that he fought to overcome. Insert#1 The world's oldest hospital was established, for the care of those who were considered mad, in England more than seven centuries ago. This is the Bethlem Royal Hospital in London. It was founded in 1247. The word bedlam is derived as a corrupted colloquial version of Bethlem. The recognition of madness as a condition in which the sufferer is perceived as someone who needs to be segregated from the rest of society for his or her unruly and unacceptable behaviour goes back thus to at least the 13th century. The Bethlem Royal Hospital was established for the care and cure of such people. That was the first madhouse or asylum in the world. To recognize some people as mad a family, community, or society would need to notice repeated unruly behaviour on the part people who are perceived as a category or a class in themselves, and that may obviously be the reason or rationale in wanting to keep such individuals together and away from the rest. ### Did madhouses and asylums exist in India before Indians met Western civilization? Does Ayurveda, for instance, have anything on treating the mentally ill, the behaviourally violent, and the socially undesirable? In the South Asian, as also in other civilizations, religion and the supernatural give an ambiguous status to people who do not conform to the norms of civil behaviour; also, people with extraordinary gifts such as poet-singers, eloquent speakers, actors, artists, innovators and inventors, and even philosophers are considered mad but not in a pejorative sense. Perhaps, our South Asian civilization is unique in its forest heartland where a tribal 'civilization' that contrasts with 'city-based' civilizations grew and it nourished its city-dwelling agricultural and mercantile contemporaries in many ways until the latter started poaching upon them and vandalizing the treasures of the forest. Madness, perhaps, belongs to the forest that can heal it because most madness in our world seems to have origins, at least partly, in the ruthlessly competitive consumerist civilization that looms large over the entire planet, the only habitat of homo sapien sapiens--our race. Melancholia or depression is a civilizational disorder encountered at the level of a few victims who report at hospitals or clinics for treatment. Mania is its other pole and is as rampant. Among people I know, there is hardly a person who has not suffered from mental illness at some time or another. It is perhaps the one invisible killer disease that is the least recognized and therefore assured of a sweeping success in our pathological midst. ##### Certain sects of Indian religions have men and women whose behaviour does not conform to the majority's norms. However, the majority's attitude to them is permissive and liberal. At gigantic pilgrimages such as the Kumbh Mela, hundreds of thousands of people congregate to watch the varieties of sadhus and sadhwis whose deviant behaviour does not lead the other participants to raise an eyebrow or bat an eyelid. Madness in some persons and in some forms is not only tolerated but it is actually appreciated at times. There are people who are said to have been possessed by benevolent spirits who speak through the person they possess. They are asked questions about the future and their answers are taken seriously. ##### An English physician, Dr. William Sergeant has written a book----The Mind Possessed---on the subject. Dr. Sergeant has an interesting finding about physical and mental exhaustion leading to highly suggestible states of mind. I have myself seen possessed people at the Somavati Amavasya Festival at Jejuri near Pune. The possessed people as well as people who watch them believe that the spirit of their deity has entered the body of the possessed. They appear to be in a state of trance. They dance and their bodies are in a state of accelerating convulsion until, exhausted, they fall to the ground. They do not recall what they were saying or doing. ##### Years ago, I made a Hindi feature film---Godam---in a state of continuous 'possession'. I had written the screenplay, composed the music, and directed the film. I stopped all other work and spent two years working on the design of the film. I 'purchased' from my friend, Marathi writer Bhau Padhye the option to adapt one of his short stories to write a screenplay. I worked on the screenplay for a whole year, entered it in the National Film Development Corporation's annual competition for film scripts, and won their best script award for the year 1982. Part of the award was 100% finance to make a film on the winning script. I launched the film Godam in early 1983. I visualized Godam in such minute detail that my actors and crew knew only the broadest outline of the film. Very often, they were puzzled by what they felt were spontaneous departures and deviations from the script they had been given to read and realize. They were right. My shooting script was not exactly what the screenplay was. They thought I had gone mad because I insisted on their doing what I told them to and I discouraged discussion. I was seeing the film and hearing it with great clarity and in fine detail. They were right in thinking I was mad because my thinking was inexplicable. They as well as I worked under severe tension. I became autocratic, even dictatorial, but I got them to do exactly what I wanted to see on the screen. On the last day of filming, as we packed up to go home to Mumbai from the location, I gave each member of my team a small metal image of Khandoba, the leading folk-deity of Maharashtra. Then I drank some undiluted gin from a bottle in my satchel. Suddenly, I felt free of all constraints. I let out a full-throated scream hailing Khandoba and to everybody's astonishment, ran into the darkness of the night. That was an act of climactic madness. ##### Insert#2 For the last three years of his life, Ashay chose to live like a recluse mostly shut in his own room in our two bedrooms flat in Pune. We heard from his room his favourite music. Sometimes it was Bob Marley, Jimmy Hendrix, the Beatles, Carlos Santana, and sometimes Ustad Vilayat Khan, or Pandit Ramnarayan, or Nikhil Ghosh. Of late, he had taken to listening to the mercurial- voiced Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan, the Sufi singer from Pakistan, or the female singer Abida, or our own home grown Marathi Varkari bhajans by unknown pilgrims to Pandharpur. Then at times we heard him play his bongos, his favourite drums since his adolescence. When he was in Iowa City, he actually played them as a semi-professional at a bar called The Mill with a group known by the name Los Latinos. He was the only Asian Indian member of that Hispanic American graduate students group and he was just a high school kid then. Burt Blume ---a Program Assistant at the International Writing Program of the University of Iowa who looked after the Visiting Fellows---was a special friend to Ashay. They shared a love of Jazz, the Blues singers, and Afro-Latin American music----the whole 1970s mood in music. Ashay's musical taste and interest was influenced, from his infancy, by my own. It received further boost from his childhood idol, my friend Bhola Sherestha who was a composer of Hindi film music: and from my brother-in-law Arvind Mulgaonkar, Ashay had inherited an uncompromising taste in Indian music, especially its rhythmic component. The popular film singer Kishore Kumar and the composer R.D. Burman were his favourites, too. #### Ashay was isolated and distanced within his own family and circle of friends. Though deeply unhappy and despondent as he had become, Ashay craved for human company. He was not unsociable or anti- social. Communication was a vital component of life for him. He also felt the urge to tell his story to a world that seemed to have forgotten Bhopal and moved on. It was obvious to us that Ashay was suffering from acute mental agony. He seemed to have developed an obsession that drained him of all his available energy. We thought he needed psychiatric help. We suggested to him that he should see a psychiatrist. He was hurt and angry. " You're trying to get rid of me," he once said, fuming," You escaped Bhopal. I didn't. I couldn't. That story isn't over for me yet. It has damaged my life and it is taking its toll---even now." #### Ashay did not suffer from something physically obvious that people hide for the fear of being stigmatized---such as. For example, poor victims of AIDS (though that infection is non-contagious except through sexual transmission, anyway) or from something such as advanced leprosy that makes its victims physically fearsome or repulsive and yet unable to hide their lesions from the world. Neither was he suffering from some contagious disease such as the dreaded bubonic plague, or the myriad variety of microbial infection such as killer forms of encephalitis, or treatment-resistant influenza, malaria, or tuberculosis. He was clinically 'healthy', except that he was very skinny and underweight, and looked fragile. He looked much younger than his age and let others treat him as such due to his diffidence and shyness.