Police in India found a 50-year-old American woman chained to a tree in a forest in the country’s western Maharashtra state, where she claims her Indian husband left her to die. Maharashtra Police told CBS News the woman, identified as Lalita Kayi Kumar, was found in a forest in the Sindhudurg district of the state, about 280 miles south of India’s financial capital Mumbai, on Saturday after local shepherds heard her cries for help and alerted authorities.
Photos and videos broadcast by Indian news outlets showed an emaciated-looking woman clad in ragged, loose clothing being assisted by rescuers in the middle of a forest, with one of her legs affixed to a tree with a metal chain.
A video broadcast by India’s India Today TV channel showed medics surrounding Kumar on a hospital bed as she wrote a note to communicate her story. In it, she says she is unable to speak and alleges that her husband left her shackled in the jungle to die.
“Injection for extreme psychosis which caused a severely locked jaw and inability to drink any water. Need intravenous food. 40 days without food and water. Husband tied me to a tree in the forest and said I would die there,” the note read.
Oh this poor woman. Her husband is an animal.
40 days without drinking water is impossible.
Much doubt.
I feel like after a few days chained to a tree your sense of time might not be very reliable
I read it as she was unable to open her mouth to eat, drink, and speak and was on an iv BEFORE her husband took her to the forest and left her there.
I am cautious in believing this story, the general survival rule is that a person can go 3 days without water, and 3 weeks without food. She claims she went 40 days without food and water which would be significantly longer than any person would normally survive.
I suspect the 40 days part was from the delerium
western Maharashtra state
This is India’s monsoon season.
Looking specifically at the state in question:
https://en.climate-data.org/asia/india/maharashtra-747/
It looks like this is the rainiest month of the year for Maharashtra.
EDIT: Apparently this year was also exceptionally rainy in western Maharashtra:
MUMBAI: At 1,408mm, July rainfall was 48% in excess of the month’s average quota of 855mm, thanks to the prolonged wet spell in the city.
That’s over 4.6 feet of rain, and that’s in less than the first three weeks of the month:
And with over a week left for the month to end…
EDIT2: That being said, it also says that she has psychiatric problems, but again, if my husband had, in fact, just tried to kill me via exposure, I imagine that I’d also be pretty mentally messed-up, so…shrugs I expect that the police have their work cut out for them.
EDIT3: You’re also being too conservative on food, I think. Most people these days have a lot more fat on them than in the past.
A pound of fat has about 3,500 calories. An adult female needs about 1,600 calories a day to maintain weight, so a bit under half a pound of fat a day. And once the fat is gone, your body can also burn through muscle and such.
I’ve personally fasted for over a week for the hell of it. I was chatting with my aunt a while back and learned that she’d done over two weeks for the hell of it. You don’t casually do something that puts you on the brink of death.
There’s a Scottish guy who fasted for over a year (well, under medical supervision and took vitamin pills), though he was obese going into the thing.
40 days without food is, for a woman, maybe under 20 pounds of fat, and the body can dig into the muscle after that. I’m pretty sure that the typical person – man or woman – in the US could do 40 days without food, no sweat.
We’re used to eating daily, but humans can go for a damn long time without food if they need to do so.
The article also says that the woman here was emaciated coming out of this.
EDIT4: I also think that you’re conservative on water. Water is, for anyone in a reasonably normal condition of health, way more urgent than food, no disagreement there. And you start to get problems from dehydration. I agree that if that if you cut someone off from any source of water for 40 days, they are going to be dead at the end of it – for her to have done 40 days, she’d have to had access to rainfall or condensation or digging a hole for water or something. But I’ve looked in the past, and the rule-of-thumb I’ve read was a week, and there are definitely cases of people who went for over a week without water, like shipwreck survivors. You are going to be seeing a lot of problems, though, at that point – I would very much not try pushing those limits.
https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20201016-why-we-cant-survive-without-water
In 1944, two scientists deprived themselves of water – one for three days and one for four days – but ate a dry diet of food. By the final day of their experiment, the pair had difficulties swallowing, their faces had become “somewhat pinched and pale”, but they stopped the experiment long before their condition deteriorated to the point where it became dangerous.
The ability to go without water can also vary greatly between individuals. There is some evidence, for example, that the human body can adapt to the level of water a person regularly consumes.
The longest someone is known to have gone without water was in the case of Andreas Mihavecz, an 18-year-old Austrian bricklayer who was left locked in a police cell for 18 days in 1979 after the officers on duty forgot about him. His case even made it into the Guinness Book of World Records.
CBS News Media Bias Fact Check Credibility: [High] (Click to view Full Report)
Name: CBS News Bias: Left-Center
Factual Reporting: High
Country: United States of America
Full Report: https://mediabiasfactcheck.com/cbs-news/Check the bias and credibility of this article on Ground.News
Thanks to Media Bias Fact Check for their access to the API.
Please consider supporting them by donating.Footer
Beep boop. This action was performed automatically. If you dont like me then please block me.💔
If you have any questions or comments about me, you can make a post to LW Support lemmy community.Not sure why you’re being downvoted, seeing some credibility info about the authors of an article is extremely helpful, especially when it’s a foreign publication I don’t know much about, like CBS News.
Thanks! :-)
Because it’s a wall of text bot-spam from a self-appointed arbiter of truthfulness with questionable methodology.
And it’s spammed to every posting on some subs giving the disappointing appearance of actual human activity.
Because it’s not good?
It’s a site ran by one random man, it’s got a heavily biased opinion of bias, ridiculously Zionist and will discredit any news source critical of Israel, it’s often straight up wrong, and also the bot spams every post.
I don’t get why more people aren’t annoyed at it, but I guess they don’t know much about it yet.
Because it is a wall of text and is a 100% biased source of “reliability” info.
a woman was found chained up in a forest
Oh but have you thought about the political leaning of the author though?
