Value of Human Death

I attended a safety meeting last week, to discuss operational hassles and reduction of health and safety risks. My presentation had two slides, mostly about minor spills and awareness about personal protective equipment (PPE). As I was the last presenter, I waited for my turn in the corner of the room, quietly sipping my Tetley dip-chai. The slides moved on.

I was being lulled to sleep by the quiet monotonous affair, when the slide switched again. The title of the slide: FATALITY

In black and white, with a few pictures and aerial maps, the grim incident unfolded before my eyes. There was a tractor, probably faulty, almost certainly devoid of critical maintenance, which had rolled over and fallen off the side of the road. As it was past sunset on a relatively unused road, response wasn't immediate. The driver of the vehicle, a poor man wearing a colourful turban, might have removed his seat-belt at the time of incident.

"The Injured Person or I.P. did not comply with policies," said the presenter. Without blinking, he explained the occurrence with an unwavering voice. "Since the previous accident, we have enforced strict driving rules. But compliance..."

The fact that a man had died grew upon me. A driver who I might have even seen on the road had suddenly ceased to exist. In front of me, people spoke of his death with academic interest. In the next slide, he appeared as a blip on a frequency chart and as a red block on a pyramid. The men accepted that their numbers didn't look pretty.

"He died," I said slowly to the man who sat next to me.
He looked at me and said, "Yes, they were better off last month."
"What do you mean?"
He pointed at the graph. No one had died in February. The other months had 1s, 2s and occasional 3s.

"Those are deaths?"
"Only the red ones."
"What about black? What's worse than red?" I asked, reading the colour-code.
"Oh, that's when many people die. Haven't had one in a long time."

The slides about the fatality had passed. They began to discuss an oil-spill. The man would remain as a point on a graph. And his family would get a six-figure sum as compensation.

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A farmer jumped off a tree at an AAP rally. Maybe he wasn't really a farmer, maybe he was a land-owner. He was, perhaps, rich. Maybe he wanted to contest elections as an AAP candidate. It could all have been staged.

But as the story goes, a man died in public view. No one could do much about it. And while there was temporary disruption in activity, nothing really changed. The show went on. The media arrived on the scene, and they have minted money off a corpse ever since.

If this had happened away from public view (and an AAP rally), Gajendra Singh would not be missed. There are have been nearly 3,00,000 farmer suicides in the country since 1995. Each one of these deaths could potentially bring a family to a stand-still. In a country of a billion, perhaps they don't matter?

On an average, 30-40 people have killed themselves per day. Some of these get reported, in the inside-pages of national dailies. Most of them don't get mentioned; they are unrecognized in life and in death.

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Did you know that 15-20 people are killed daily by Mumbai locals alone? 20 more people are maimed, crushed or left bruised and bleeding.

For every 1,00,000 vehicles on the road, nearly 210 people are killed on an annual basis. One person is killed for every 475 vehicles in this country. 2.5 lakh people are killed annually on Indian roads. Again, it is perhaps a small number and insignificant on an Excel sheet.

Nothing can be said about the accuracy of these figures, and statistics in developing nations are hardly reliable. In 2013, a medical research panel discovered that India was heavily under-reporting its Malaria fatalities. They found that the average number of deaths were in excess of 40,000 against a reported value of around 1,000.

We also report that around 6 children die out of every lakh simply because they don't get enough food. They die because there aren't enough grains of rice which enter their mouths, probably because they rot in remote godowns.

Each number represents the termination of as many human beings: humans who ought to be protected, nourished and allowed to grow in life, humans who should be mourned in death.

I still remember the boards on highways in the USA which sent shivers down my spine: "$100,000 FINE" (for hitting a pedestrian). Clearly, the value of life is vastly different in different parts of the globe. The Indian citizen isn't worth much. A poor Indian is worth nothing.

What are you worth?

A Tambrahm's tryst with Atheism

It all started a few months ago, when God died.

Picture credits: Arun Raghavendar

Camel

I was brought up in a typical Tamil Brahmin household. I woke up to the melody of Venkateshwara Suprabhatham and to the smell of Cycle brand agarbathies, and sometimes to the sound of bells interrupted only by the rustling of the pages of The Hindu. On auspicious days, the bell in the nearby temple would be rung some two thousand times. I was taught to wake up and look into my palms, and say an ancient prayer invoking Lakshmi, Saraswati and Govinda.

My upanayanam - the initiation ceremony - happened when I was thirteen. Ever since that day, even though the frequency of Sandhyavandhanam rapidly fell from thrice a day to zero, I have worn my poonal every minute of the day, every day of the year. I found peace in temples and other such places of belief. I didn't believe in God in a particular form, but I believed in the eternal being. Long after I left the house of my parents, I continued to pray, light the lamp and apply prayer ash on my forehead.

I have tried to remain unselfish in my prayers - asking for love, mercy, wisdom and peace for the entire world. When I entered temples, I would extinguish every incantation in my armory before proceeding to ask Him for rewards. I was almost always ashamed of asking; it trivialized the act of praying. But I always asked, and often traded things I had for things I wanted. It used to work.

One fine day, everything changed. In my mind, God died.

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Lion

In a moment of madness and revelation, it all fell apart. The firmament was ripped open, drenching my world in blood. God, from an unquestionable truth, became an abstract entity. I could no longer be sure of anything; the ground beneath my feet yielded. I fell.

The myths were no longer accounts of God's greatness. I could no longer imagine them as exaggerated versions of truth. They were as false as my poems. Time had put them on a pedestal! A false height, from where they were told to us repeatedly, until we no longer listened to them for their beauty or their nuances. They were absolute.

But now, the layers began to peel off. The Ramayana - probably our most fragile tale - was unsurprisingly the first to break. Slowly though, in quick succession, every story bit the dust. Nothing was sacred. Not only did the stories stop relating to God, their final morals disappeared. Truth was wrecked. And fact didn't exist. I was thrust into an eternal nothingness.

Without a guiding force, I began to question every action and every result. It is easier to believe in a God who doesn't play dice than in the conceited theory that our world is an orderly speck of dust in a chaotic, meaningless universe. Day after day, I asked stupider, and therefore wiser, questions, none of which had answers.

My world imploded when everything associated with myth and belief also yielded - classical music, painting and sculptures, traditional clothes and languages. We have stored eons of history in our cultural and religious fabric. And now, it was impossible to dismiss only one of these attributes - you cannot extract God from songs and literature. Along with God, my world was dying.

In the absence of heavenly rules, life was easier and harder. There were new freedoms. And unkind responsibilities. In the past, I have always prayed in misery and in gloom. When God doesn't exist, can you still pray? I did not discard the threads on my body, but I renounced God, and severed the umbilicus. In the absence of rules, you must make them. Alone and empowered, I ventured into this challenging world where no one was accountable, where there was no fate, where there was no control. Everything was hanging by a withering thread which wouldn't entirely break.

I was alone and free.

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Child

A few days ago, I went to the temple again. I found myself at its doorstep quite unintentionally, and if I had retained my earlier beliefs, I'd have termed it Destiny. Even in the brighter confines of this modern temple, there was peace. A beautiful silence enveloped me. I paused to think. And then, thinking paused.

The very same confines which stir some men to murder and violence blessed me. I wanted to believe that God wasn't dead. I wanted to talk to Him and to myself. I didn't have anything to ask, but I wanted to offer my belief.

I am convinced that humans need to believe in order to live, if not in God then in something or someone else. But true belief doesn't require you to hold on, because a satisfying peace is never insecure.

I could sit on a rock in the middle of the sea, or perch myself upon on a jagged rock jutting into the infinite sky, or gaze into a crackling crimson flame or watch the night sky with its billion stars. These, for me, are moments of God.

That day, the temple - because of its peace or its cool grey stone, or simply because of its familiarity - brought me closer to this exalted state. For the first time, in the stone, I could see His presence and His absence. In such a moment, I realized that my beliefs would disagree with everyone who has contemplated on the subject. But I knew that my beliefs would not exist if others stopped contemplating.

Just as belief in God is a compartmentalized thought, disbelief is also. Only the simultaneous existence of both possibilities encompasses the whole. Tolerance stems from the whole.

There is now contentment and ambition, peace and passion, earth and heaven.

Je ne suis pas Charlie Hebdo

Charb is dead. Twelve people are dead, including two police officers. There are at least six other associated deaths. And yesterday, Said and Cherif Kouachi (prime suspects) died.

That is a lot of blood over a bunch of cartoons. Perhaps a moment of silence to mourn the dead? Maybe we need two minutes to pay our respects... Wait, respect? In 1970, de Gaulle died a few days after a catastrophic fire in a nightclub, the Club Cinq-Sept, in which nearly 150 people died. Enter Charlie Hebdo headline, spoofing newspaper coverage of the event: "Tragic ball at Colombey. One dead."

Charlie Hebdo would not want the world to sit back and mourn. So, let us take this apart with academic precision and, if possible, some satire. But first, let us say this aloud: shooting is wrong.


Equal-Opportunity Offenders?

Being a magazine which describes itself as anti-racist and left-wing, Charlie Hebdo claims to be an equal-opportunity offender. In other words, they claim to be fundamentally irreverent. The only thing holy in their scriptures is the act of irreverence. They lived to mock and, unfortunately, perished in their mocking.

But in order effectively implement equal-opportunity mocking in a real-world scenario, it is paramount to understand the prevailing socio-economic pulse. In France, where the minority Muslims still find themselves a marginalized population, Charlie Hebdo failed to recognize the zeitgeist (or they understood it too well, and decided to ride a hate-wave while it lasted).

France's Muslim population is predominantly Algerian, owing to their 150 year long relationship with the north-African country. Due the enormous flux of people - population moved both ways - across the Mediterranean, and due to the return of several "pied noirs" with their families in the 60's, there is a huge Muslim population in Europe.

Like in most other parts of the world except the Arab peninsula, these Muslim communities are poor and often neglected. In addition to this, France's continued meddling in Algerian affairs, through direct and indirect aid to fight the Islamists, pours more oil into a steadily growing flame. With the backdrop of growing volatility and Isalomophobia, France has previously come up with laws to ban the head-scarf "l'affaire du voile" and other such methods which only further the unrest. Today, the minority-Muslims fill French prisons, making it virtually the only place where they have a sizeable majority.

Charlie Hebdo is not wise in expecting this affected population to have the same sense of humour such as, say, Nicolas Sarkozy. And while the latter has a powerful voice which we can hear, downtrodden masses often shout to deaf ears. An early message came as a legal suit (which failed) in 2006 after the  Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. There was another warning in the form of a petrol bomb in 2011. In 2015, they died.

They died in the same way the terrorists died, defending a rather indefensible idea - that of provoking for the sake of provoking. Ironically, both the artists and the terrorists have, in very different ways, martyred themselves. Today, I condemn the killings and mourn the humans who died. But have we lost artists who were of any value to society?


Die and Let Die

Charlie Hebdo had a regular circulation of about 100,000. It showed a sudden increase in circulation by up to 200% during the Jyllands-Posten Muhammad cartoons controversy. At the time, Jack Chirac condemned the publication for stoking communal disharmony. The Islamic world condemned the magazine, in good spirit, via litigation and through unveiled threats. Nicolas Sarkozy however voiced his support for free speech.

Invasion of faith is often invasion of a person's personal space. While being vociferous in propagating one's religion can be decried, so too must ridicule and derision of that faith. Perhaps, a day will come when religion is utterly unimportant, when we can happily laugh about petrol-bombs and crusades. But that day is not today.

Charlie Hebdo realized that polarization was critical to the magazine's success, and they capitalized on it. After the fire-bombing, Charb said that the attack was carried out by "stupid people who don't know what Islam is" and that they were "idiots who betray their own religion." Big words for someone who claims to hold nothing and no one sacred.

On Self-Censorship

In a historic move, the American Civil Liberties Union took a stand on "free speech". They allowed Nazis to parade through a holocaust-survivor neighbourhood. While this did not actually happen, this is what we could come to expect of free speech: the right to hear a dissenting voice without necessarily approving of it.

However, there are several cases where this is not yet applicable. For example, a Bangalore based techie was arrested in December for running ISIS's Twitter account. Later, police said that he had links the terrorists and could provide valuable information, but the premise for his arrest was the fact that he ran a terrorist-organization's social media operations. Is this not a variation of the same free-speech? Or must we device a clean way to distinguish between association with historical crimes and with crimes which are currently underway?

In the current scenario, freedom of speech is usually a moderated freedom granted with the expectation that self-censorship and "common sense" will prevail. Take, for example, Raj Shetye's recent photo-shoot which made so many of us go up in arms! This is "gang rape artwork" as opposed to "ridiculing religion artwork". Just because the people who were affected in this case did not fall under an organized group, the opposition was not decried. In fact, the very media which today sides with #jesuischarlie ensured that Shetye's website was shut-down.

Burning the Flag

We limit ourselves to religion, and therefore define 'freedom of expression' rather poorly. Why are the same people who are with #jesuischarlie against the idea of burning the national flag? If I burn a flag or the constitution, I am only expressing myself.

Why was the media in a frenzy when this happened?

Infamous Ganesh swimsuit

While the idea of free-speech is important, it usually makes sense to take account of people's sensitivities. Throwing a banana at an African player on the football field still counts as racism. Why can we not sit back and laugh at that?

Equal opportunity bigotry (i.e. hate everything, mock everything) seems a good way to dodge racism charges. But we will most certainly, as I read in Arthur Chu's article on the Daily Beast, end up with chan culture.

In India, we are still debating if PK was targeting religion or not. Perhaps there were moments in the film which can be construed as religion-based humour, but we are perhaps at a stage when these transgressions can be ignored. However, when a magazine makes it a point to poke an oppressed section of society in the eye time after time, with no other purpose than to make some people laugh and others scream, sometimes people throw bombs. Is this right? - Probably not. Will this happen? - yes.

Did Charlie Hebdo achieve its goal, and glory - which their cartoons are not worthy of - through death?