India, April 5 -- We have always known how to postpone death. We built hospitals and filled them with machines that can sustain biological function long after every meaningful possibility has receded; we extended lifespans, reduced infant mortality and pushed back the frontier of cardiac arrest and cancer and infectious disease. We called this civilisational progress, a description that in many respects holds, but somewhere in the accumulation of all this capacity to keep the body alive, we forgot to ask a prior question: what, precisely, are we keeping alive, and for whose benefit are we keeping it alive? That question has remained politely unasked for a long time, carried in whispers through hospital corridors and never quite making it ...