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Skeletons - 100% free desi ishtyle

By: Santosh :+: Under: Business, Crime
On: ⋅ November 29, 2007 ⋅  Email this post ⋅  Print this post ⋅ Post a comment
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India, well known for the practice of body shopping now takes it up a notch - skeleton shopping. [link via]

Making no bones about this business
img: via NPR

Calcutta, which has always beens a hub for this grotesque business, is now the epicenter of a global market in skeleton trade.

For 200 years, the city has been the center of a shadowy network of bone traders who snatch up skeletons in order to sell them to universities and hospitals abroad. In colonial times, British doctors hired thieves to dig up bodies from Indian cemeteries. Despite changes in laws, a similar process is going strong today.

Granted human skeletons are a necessity for fields like medical and forensic sciences, the problem here is the way in which these “businesses” in Calcutta go about obtaining these skeletons. Grave robbers go about digging up bodies from graves, smuggling corpses from morgues and fishing human remains out of rivers.

Young Brothers, a firm which specialized in this trade has even come up with a catalog - sort of a LL Bean for skeletons.

Most prominently, a firm called Young Brothers — located conveniently between the city’s biggest morgue and largest cemetery — has excelled in the black market. It has taken a bold approach — advertising its bone selection in catalogues and going to extreme measures to maintain its supply, according to a former clerk who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation.

“They took the bodies from the river, from the graveyard and from the hospital. More than 5,000 dead bodies I have seen,” she says.

It’s one thing if you voluntarily donated your body and/or organs to science after death. But I’m guessing none of these folks whose bodies/skeletons were stolen from their graves, voluntarily expressed a desire to donate their bodies in this manner before they passed on. Predictably, law enforcement has no laws or even the will to produce any, to deal with this massive violation of dead bodies. But then again, the government in West Bengal is actually in the business of creating more dead out of the living than spend their time protecting the ones who passed on.

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