Remembering the Dead

I learnt a new proverb today. chacchinODi kaLLu chAreDu. (The dead fellow had large eyes.) This will become the second proverb that I will recall from now on whenever a public figure dies. The first one is pOyinOLLu andaru machOLLu. (The dead are all good.)

In school, our Telugu non-detail textbooks often had six long boring template essays each about well-known people from various walks of life. The ones about people who were already dead (which is most of them) ended with sections on their death, their positive traits and how the living paid them tributes.  One essay question always had to do with the tributes, and among six such questions in the textbook one always came in the exam. I failed to learn anything from these essays and was not inspired by an iota.

When I began reading newspapers, I noticed the obituaries. They all had a familiar template — birth, education, work and achievements, positive traits, death, and tributes — and the positive traits and tributes sections were strikingly similar. (For the more “important” public figures, the tributes were printed as separate articles.) Did the news reporters learn writing obituaries in our school?

And it seems disturbingly implicit that the people should only remember these confident disciplined hard-working incorrput intelligent kind-hearted noble peace-loving souls only by these obituaries and tributes pain-stakingly filled with flowery language. Decades after Nehru or Indira Gandhi or Rajiv Gandhi died when someone offers an unconventional perspective about their statesmanship or point out their probable part in a catastrophe we silence the perspectives in the din and uproar created.

Why? Why does seeing dead people for what they were seem as frightening as seeing death itself? Like James Hadley Chase wrote the dead stay dumb. Is it our hope that denying their mistakes could miraculously wipe out their consequences? Or that if we glorify the dead we ourselves will be glorified after death?

Today’s media in its desire to please is taking this craziness to new levels with tearful tributes by the reporters themselves in the foreground and songs of glory in the background. I wonder if they cut cakes behind that background celebrating the coverage of these deaths.

Every fallen soldier didn’t die for the nation. Every dead politician was not a statesman. Every dead actor was not a thespian. Though every fan who committed suicide was most likely a loser.

This hypocrisy, this acquired inability to question the deeds of the dead is one of the many things that plagues us from progress. Inability to accept the follies of our past leaders causes inability to accept our own. People alive deserve more respect than the dead.