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How we all failed Gajendra Singh

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Pia Kahol
Pia KaholApr 23, 2015 | 21:43

How we all failed Gajendra Singh

What does a dead person look like? Maybe sometimes people in very deep sleep look dead, but I doubt that's an accurate description. The truth is that body breathes, and when it stops exchanging air, fluids and food with its environment it looks distinct, apart, separated from life as it were. It looks more object then subject. The human response is highly correlated with our own emotional entanglement with the dead. As it happens, after years of hearing about farmer deaths, a dead farmer Gajendra Singh has finally rocked our conscience. Finally we are compelled to consider the plight of farmers. Moreover, his death has brought home to us the part we may have played, or continue to play, in the anguish of several sections of our society.

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As I watched the sequence of events unfold on the television, I remembered my last experience with suicide. My own cousin, thirteen year old girl studying in a leading private school in Delhi, had hung herself in the afternoon. How is it possible, I have often wondered, that she felt such extreme distress and no one in our large family could hear her anguish. As I watched Gajendra Singh hang herself in broad daylight in front of thousands of people I wondered again how is it that none of us were moved by his pleas while there was still time.At the death bed of my thirteen year old cousin, some brutal truths about humanity hit home with me. I witnessed a glee on faces of visitors as if they had come to a circus and couldn't help childishly turn towards other spectators as if to say "Did you ever imagine you would see this?" There she lay on the floor on an assembled bed of old sofa cushions with red and yellow stripes covered with a cheap blue synthetic bed cover. (Whoever did that was clearly conscious that anything that touched her dead body will not be reused.) Her face, still bearing the marks of her last struggle, was turned to the side slightly upturned like when for small babies who cannot control their neck the head lolls about. Her lips were parted, blue with cracks around them.

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In the large living room, everybod ysat on the sofas against the wall that surrounded this central exhibit. I stood in the corner feeling a pang; a searching emptiness but no extreme sadness or anger. People were remarkably normal, interweaving conversations of her death with dinner menu and grandson's antics. The conversation among the visitors and the relatives only briefly settled on the causes of her death, where everyone overwhelmingly blamed the girl. Her parents wailed why did she do this to them when they had done everything in their capacity. Everybody nodded sympathetically.

The reality is we all react differently to death, especially when it is a suicide. Not everybody responds to death with sorrow. Sure, we pay our condolences. Everyone has a feeling of diffused responsibility but no one feels they were personally responsible for the tragedy. The most visible aspect is apathy for the mental trauma of the recently deceased. An instinct for self-preservation underlies our conversations surrounding the dead body. A more sincere soul may show signs of resignation or learned helplessness but he too shall stop short of being self-critical. In cases of blatant murder where someone cudgels someone to death, we have a guilty party but in cases of suicides we act with a sort of distant remorse and get back to our lives as soon we can. After all there is a limit to how much human mind can delve into other people's distress.

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There might be biological reasons for this. Crying is far more serious business than laughing. While one smiles in various ways, not always signifying pleasure, tears themselves will only run down once the whole body has surrendered to intrinsic sadness of the experience. Grief rarely comes in an unadulterated form. Some grown up people (especially women)--with their infantile imagination--believe that crying is an essential expression of grief. The result is a caricature; no one can explicitly doubt the authenticity of the tears but neither is anyone consciously moved by it.

How then we may react to an untimely death? Especially one that we may have had played some part in. In the face of a collective failure, it is frivolous to discuss who may or may not have done the "right thing". In fact, the implications of death only sink in with the passage of time. This is true for all of us. And it was certainly true, however unfortunately, with AAP leaders who thought it was still worthwhile to go on with their speeches. Perhaps, the only genuine discussion in the aftermath is why we have a system that drove a thirteen year old girl to suicide or a grown man to public hanging. At times like these the only truthful thing to do is to acknowledge that the misery did not really touch us while that person was still alive.

The need of the hour is put aside the blame game and ponder on how to keep the empathy alive. The effort should be to translate our collective remorse into tangible action so that communities are not driven to such extremes. More than that, as a nation, we need to rethink the framework for our policies. Today, it is the farmers. But tomorrow maybe it could be small industrialist, or domestic help, who are suffering in private right now but are not on our television screens yet. In our search for the personal luxuries, let us not forget our aspiring millions. Let us not also talk about only the needs of our bottom thirds, but also their wants. Let us involve them in the definitions of India Inc.

Human nature is flippant. Hunger and thirst gives way to remorse just as quickly. People who sat surrounding my cousin's dead body had seen her deteriorating mental condition over several months. People who are crying hoarse over Gajendra Singh's suicide had known about farmers' plight for years. Somehow our selfish minds knew that as long as it does not enter our chambers, we have no business meddling with it. Now, when death stares us in our face, we must not forget the part we ourselves may have played in this tragedy. This is ripe time for "manthan", the mythological churning of the ocean. And when the great sea churns, both vish and amrit shall come forth.

Last updated: April 23, 2015 | 21:43
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