Proposed promatorium

"It really goes quickly. There is white smoke and you see it fall apart. It doesn’t feel violent,” Susanne Wiigh-Masak, the Swedish marine biologist who developed and patented a new process for the speedy disposal of a corpse was quoted in The Guardian of October 1, 2005, forwarded to us by Nawshir Khurody. The world’s first promatorium that was scheduled to open in the Swedish town of Jonkoping in 2006 is expected to be more tasteful and better for the environment than cremation or conventional burial. The word promatorium is an amalgam of promession, after death, and crematorium, states the website.

The procedure to be adopted requires submerging the dead body in liquid nitrogen. "At 200 degrees below zero the body becomes brittle, so we do not have to use some unethical way to break it up into pieces,” explained the biologist. Frozen bodies can be shattered using an adapted muscle stimulation machine. The powdered remains will be then dried, packed into a biodegradable box made of potato or corn starch and buried in a shallow grave.

Experiments with pigs have shown it takes between one and two hours to freeze the body and then less than a minute of gentle shaking to turn it to powder.

There could be a lesson here for the Parsis who are still groping for a solution in the absence of vultures at the Doongerwadi.