I had heard a lot about it for the last couple of years and finally, I got to see it with my own eyes, yesterday: Bodies Revealed.

It is one of the most fascinating exhibitions that I have ever seen. The exhibited bodies seem so real… oh, wait! they are REAL. Whole bodies as well as different organs and parts are preserved using a special polymer preservation process. Every specimen is arranged in order to display different functional systems of the body such as digestive, circulatory, nervous, skeletal and muscular system, etc. It is one thing to see a 2D drawings on paper that shows the anatomy and then viewing the real thing like this in full three dimensions. It gives you a whole new perspective on how the complex and fragile human body is put together.

One of the displays showed a woman with blackened lungs from years of smoking. Next to it, they had a clear garbage container with packs of cigarettes in it. Don’t know if people threw them in or it was a part of the display. Looking at what smoking does to your lungs, I am sure many would be inspired to discard their cigarettes.

One exhibit that I liked the most was “arteries of arm”. It showed just a mesh of blood vessels from an arm and without any other part, it actually made the shape of an arm complete with all the fingers. It was very surreal.

At the end, a couple of people were answering questions and they had a preserved brain and a cigarette-blackened lung for everyone to touch. It felt really really strange to handle these real body parts.

I wasn’t sure how the exhibition would be for kids, so didn’t take mine along. But there were a lot of kids there and many were of Ashwini’s age. I am going to make sure that Ashwini visits the exhibition with V before it goes away from here.

Don’t miss it if it comes to a venue near you.