We heaved a collective sigh of relief when the year 1984 drew to a close. The worst of the Orwellian nightmares had not materialised. No Big Brother, no newspeak, no spying telescreens. Yet, real life is bound to catch up with fiction at some point. The cloning of the human being is very much on the anvil. Wombs are now available for hire. Doesn’t all this remind you of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World? Most of us are optimistic and would like to reassure ourselves that these things only happen in labs run by maverick scientists. If we believe this for a second, we are fooling ourselves. I work in an overgrown village in Central Travancore—a village that fancies itself a town. I once woke up to loud music. Rubbing my eyes, I peeped out of my fourth floor window to discover what the commotion was all about. Prosperous looking men were scurrying about. They were issuing instructions of all kinds—to car drivers, to men with video cameras, and to each other. I looked on in disbelief. All this frenzy was happening outside the hospital mortuary in preparation for a funeral! My mind raced back to the Brave New World. In Huxley’s vision of a future order, funerals are not sombre events but gay affairs with corpses being flown out in brightly painted helicopters. Perhaps the bizarre phenomenon playing out before my eyes had something to do with a sense of guilt in children, for not having been able to look after their parents well enough, given their need to stay ahead in the rat-race. Well, a grand funeral is some sort of compensation, certainly. In any case, most of us lead such dull lives that any event, even a funeral, marks a change. I suspect there is an element of one-upmanship, too. Some build grand houses, others buy fancy cars. Now perhaps there is competition over who manages the most opulent send-off for a dear one? I recently visited a bereaved aunt of mine to commiserate with her. But ammayi would have none of it. Before I could open my mouth, she ventured to describe her husband’s burial in detail. “No ordinary event—two bishops, at least, a dozen priests, nephews coming from as far as Muscat and California,” she related proudly. I reckoned the departed soul was better off where he was and beat a hasty retreat. O brave new world!
