India, April 13 -- 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 ...