Empty grief

How should you declare mourning? Is it not essentially a private affair? Would it not be a case of manifest hypocrisy to pretend that we are...

How should you declare mourning? Is it not essentially a private affair? Would it not be a case of manifest hypocrisy to pretend that we are really upset by a death that does not touch us? These questions hit me again when a three-day state mourning was declared recently in Orissa when a long-ailing former chief minister passed away. Half the people did not know that he was alive, and the other half did not care. But such were the compulsions of institutionalised hypocrisy that those who participated in a condolence meeting called by the present chief minister almost forgot the solemnity of the occasion and were their boisterous, garrulous selves, laughing and gossiping as they are wont to do.

I remember when my uncle died some years ago, there was a stream of visitors who howled and beat their breasts in explicit grief, even as I stood quietly in a corner looking at the stilled body that used to be my uncle. A few days later I saw many of these visitors at the funeral feast. They wore not a trace of the grief they had exhibited so loudly and obviously just a few days earlier.

Does death affect us if the deceased is not that of a near and dear one? Does it even terrify us? There was this young business tycoon who moved around unshaven, garbed in black for 11 days after the death of his pet pomeranian. He was in mourning; he even chose to move around in a black car to indicate this. Nothing wrong with such grieving for a pet but how come he was the same man who was not moved enough by the accidental death of one of his workers to release adequate compensation for the bereaved family?

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I often remember the story of Margot Asquith, the well-known obituarist. She used to keep her obituaries ready for people who were in imminent danger of kicking the bucket. One day A.J. Balfour, an old friend of hers, sauntered into the room only to find a piece of paper on the table bearing an obituary on him, which Asquith was obviously preparing. It began: “Today our friend Balfour passed away. It’s an irreparable damage…”

Come to think of it, we have become even more callous than Margot Asquith. We are a nation that has institutionalised condolence by declaring public holidays on the death of the great and the good, but we seem to have lost our capacity to actually appreciate and truly grieve for the people who have inspired us in their time. Their passing has become yet another ritual, completely robbed of all meaning.

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