Every time he received a call about an accident and a brain dead victim, K Raghuram would get to work. As CEO of the Andhra Pradesh chapter of MOHAN (Multi-Organ Harvesting Aid Network), a private initiative to encourage organ donations, he would rush, battle formalities, spend hours counseling relatives. If he finally succeeded in convincing a family to donate the victim’s organs, he would organize for the patient to be taken to one of the ten hospitals in MOHAN’s network.

Then on January 13, 2004, two years into his job, he got a call at midnight.

One more brain-dead victim was available — this time, it was his son. Swamy Narayan, a 19-year-old second-year engineering graduate was traveling with friends on the Ibrahim-Patnam highway en route to the Nagarjuna Sagar dam when their car hit a median, part of construction for the Krishna water pipeline, about 25 km from Hyderabad. Swami was thrown out of the car into a ditch, his head hit the ground with crunching impact, severing the brain stem.

“There was not a scratch on his body,” recalls Raghuram. It was a wrenching decision for him and his wife Lalitha. “Although we had been counseling hundreds of families that they should donate organs of their brain-dead relatives, we realized how tough it was for us. It helped me understand how other families I counseled must have felt. We told ourselves we will be doing society a great favour and setting an example. So we donated our son’s kidneys, eyes and liver.”

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