To Live is to Die

i am inured to death...

Everyday I wake up thinking "there is at least one person on this Earth who has already died today or will die today...at least one..." it is a thought that's not very comforting, how we take death so matter of factly when it appears in newsprint or on TV, how we are so inured to it that we just expect that the next time we wake up, a thousand people, who are loved by a thousand others, will be gone forever...

But then again, what is death? Do we really know? Nobody has ever come back and said "oh yeah, it's a sad place!" OR "oh yeah, it's the best existence ever". 

So basically, it is the ultimate unknown..forget the depths of the ocean or the vastness of space..death is the one question nobody can answer...i think that if somebody can answer the question of death, then he/she can answer the question to life as well

...no one knows if you feel happiness or sadness at the end of it. No one knows if you feel pain or are painless. No one knows if there is an "other side". I use the word "knows" in the pure scientific sense where "knowing something" involves absolute proof...

i am inured to death...

and it started one fine morning in the city of Jamshedpur, Jharkhand (formerly Bihar), India, where my father was taking me and my brother to the local recreation club (United Club) for a swimming session. We were on a yellowish-greenish Lambretta scooter, license plate starting DBI....the three of us, and were just about to enter the main road in Kadma outside our house when a crowd of people on the road caught our attention.

what's going on? why are there so many people? why is there a truck standing in the middle of the road with a crowd of people around it? why is there a delay to me leaving the house at the age of who-knows-what, to me enjoying an enjoyable swim?

the answers came as we moved closer...i managed to poke my head through the crowd and caught a glimpse. a man lying on the road with his right cheek almost drowned in a pool of blood and his head was literally opened up. a large section of his brain was on the road. a motorbike lay right next to him...

i wish i could draw, i wish i had spent more time in the art school that was situated about 200 metres from this death scene. i wish i could draw this death scene for you, but i can't. i have it in my memory...the way the pink brain matter was flowing out from his head, the way everybody in the crowd was just standing shocked...the way his eyes and mouth were open, while the brain matter and blood inched its way towards full view from behind his head on the road.

Apparently a baby gains 80% of his knowledge from his/her mother...maybe the remaining 20% is what his/her eyes can show in the first few years of life

...i was told later that the man lying dead was a policeman who had been chasing somebody on his enfield motorcycle and had collided with a truck...whether this is true or not i don't know but it has stayed with me since...

maybe this is why I'm inured to death.

i spent all of the next day poring through newspapers, looking for something, anything on this incident.. even a small column...we had a cousin living with us at the time, Lipsa, and i distinctly remember her saying something along the lines of "oh it probably wasn't that big an incident, otherwise it would have made the news".  the newspaper was sort of a 50% orange colour..like an economic times kind of colour

I did not find him. i looked really hard, promise. i really wanted to...this man who was probably doing his duty, who lived by it and literally died by it, who had the potential to change human nature itself with the simple action of catching a law-breaker...he deserved a mention...people needed to know...but nothing  that i found suggested he was given a mention...

does it mean no one cared? no it doesn't. a mother, a father..perhaps brothers and sisters, perhaps friends...the shock when somebody you know and love dies. is that unbearable? 

BUT does my policeman friend care? you don't know do you? you don't know if he's feeling really pissed off about his death. should he feel pissed off? maybe it's all over, or maybe he's sitting in a cloud playing a harp...if somebody ends their life, people might say "oh that's a bad thing because he's left all of us so sad, and he's so selfish yada yada yada"

nobody ever stops to think that maybe the guy who's dead can no longer care...

five people crying...five thousand crying? doesn't make any difference to that person...he's gone...

today i read that a plane crash in Nepal had killed some people, while a woman in Ireland had allowed her son to be taken away by people to be shot in the legs for being a drug user. at the other end, it was breaking news that some person was seen in public wearing a bikini a few months after her fake implanted boobs had exploded...

sometimes i feel like the world wasn't good enough for my policeman friend...

Both Death and News have come a long way