Stories & Reflections

Pyaar, Mohabbat, Aur Seva: What a Mumbai Newspaper Got Right About Palliative Care

A few weeks ago, Sunday Mid-day ran a piece by Arpika Bhosale called “Pyaar, mohabbat, aur seva.” It’s a quiet, well-reported story about the Romila Palliative Care Centre in Mumbai, and it does something I don’t see often in mainstream coverage of this field: it gets palliative care right.

I want to walk through why, because the misunderstanding it corrects is the same one I keep running into on this site.

The Myth the Article Names Directly

Bhosale opens by naming the assumption most of us carry without questioning it — that palliative care is something that begins in the final days, a kind of medical goodbye. She then does the useful thing: she shows that it isn’t. Modern palliative care supports people living with stroke, dementia, heart disease, kidney failure, and other serious, long-running conditions — not just people who are actively dying. The goal is quality of life, sustained over months or years, not a countdown.

She also does something braver: she turns the lens on her own family, wondering aloud whether her father’s decline after multiple strokes could have gone differently — for him and for the people caring for him — if palliative support had been part of the picture earlier. That’s not a rhetorical device. It’s the question most families only ask in hindsight, and it’s exactly the question I hope more people ask before a crisis, not after.

Two Families, One Team

The article follows two stories from the Romila team’s caseload.

Roohi Shaikh’s mother lived for several years after a stroke before she passed away. What stayed with Roohi wasn’t a medical intervention — it was the team’s insistence on treating her mother as present, even after she’d lost the ability to communicate. They spoke to her. They held her hand. And the support didn’t stop at the death certificate: the team continued with bereavement counselling for the family afterward.

Rupesh Jadhav’s story runs the other direction — a stroke survivor whose mobility and awareness improved meaningfully through physiotherapy and steady follow-up. His family credits the team not with a miracle, but with something more durable: guidance, at every step, through a situation that had initially overwhelmed them.

Different trajectories. Same underlying model — a team that shows up for the physical symptoms and the exhaustion, confusion, and grief that surround them.

“Restoring a Sense of Choice”

The line from the article I keep coming back to is from Dr. Bhavika Hotchandani, who describes palliative care as addressing physical symptoms alongside psychological, social, and spiritual needs — with a central goal of restoring patients’ sense of choice and independence, even in small ways, inside a serious illness.

Even in small ways. That qualifier matters. Nobody is promising to reverse the illness. What’s being offered is something narrower and, I’d argue, harder: making sure the person inside the diagnosis still gets to decide things — what to eat, who to see, how to spend an afternoon — for as long as that’s possible.

The Mantra

The piece ends with something Dr. Ashutosh Joshi shared: pyaar, mohabbat, aur seva — love, affection, and service. Three words that aren’t clinical at all, offered by a doctor, about a doctor’s job.

I don’t think that’s sentimental filler. I think it’s the most accurate one-line definition of good palliative care I’ve read, and it applies just as much to the family doing the caregiving as it does to the professionals visiting the home. My own mother has been oxygen-dependent for years, with my father as her primary caregiver, and if I had to describe what holds that kind of long caregiving arrangement together on the hard days, it isn’t a protocol. It’s some version of those same three words.

Why I’m Writing This Down

Stories like this one matter because they’re rare in general-interest press. Most coverage of serious illness in India still defaults to the end-of-life framing Bhosale’s article pushes back against. When a Sunday paper gets the nuance right — palliative care as living well, not dying well — it’s worth amplifying, not just reading and moving on.

If someone in your family has recently been diagnosed with a serious or chronic illness, this is a good moment to ask their treating doctor one question: would palliative support help alongside treatment, starting now, rather than later? That single question is the one the article’s stories all trace back to.

Continue Exploring

This is part of our Stories & Reflections series. For the practical, myth-by-myth version of what’s above, see Living Well in Mumbai: Why Palliative Care Is About Quality of Life, Not End of Life. For what a home-visiting team actually does hour to hour, see What I Saw, Shadowing a Palliative Care Team for a Day.

Source: Arpika Bhosale, “Pyaar, mohabbat, aur seva,” Sunday Mid-day.

If this changed how you think about what palliative care actually offers, there’s more where this came from. Subscribe for plain-language guides and reflections on caring for a loved one with serious illness, written from Mumbai for families anywhere. Have a story or a question of your own? Send it in — sam-bhava reads every one, even though it can’t offer individual medical advice.