LONG before cassettes, compact discs and other hi-tech sources of music invaded our lives, there was the humble LP – or long play records.
Now, played over and over again for every guest and her uncle’s relative who came home, the records often got scratched beyond repair, leading to the needle going all over the place. It also got stuck quite often, playing in a loop like a broken record.
Example: like India’s health minister Ghulam Nabi Azad, who, plagued even as the country is with swine flu and a world of other health issues, is stuck on controlling India’s population with ideas of late marriages and late-night TV programming to deter sex.
Which brings us to the issue we might as well discuss. Population. Azad is right, in a roundabout way: India’s population is way too much for our political, civil, social and anti-social societies to care too much about a few lives gone here, and a few gone there. A few lives snuffed out by a pillar falling at a Metro construction site in South Delhi, for instance.
Or more lives that could have been snuffed out barely 30 hours later at the same site, when cranes pulling out the crashed debris crashed themselves.
The reaction: inquiry commissions galore, and the obligatory few lakhs of ‘compensations’ announced for families of the ‘victims’.
Question: Can you compensate for a life? That, too, life of the lone earning member of a family, most likely steeped in debt back in the village? For, that precisely is the state of the families of Anshuman Pratihar, Pappu Yadav, Amit Yadav and Niranjan Yadav, as reported by Delhi Newsline over the last two days.
What, pray, were they doing? Following the government’s ever-ambitious dreams of basking in its own glory, come October 2010 with the Commonwealth Games, and putting one more project on an even more ambitious track.
‘See, what we have done!’ the political class would say next October, and you can bet that your October 2010 salary on that. ‘If there’s a will, there’s a way,’ they would gleam on.
Sure, but as every smoker knows the poor-taste joke: if there’s too much of Wills, there always is a smoke.
You can’t of course blame the authorities, for within hours after six men turned ‘victims’, the Metro railway chief took ‘moral responsibility’ and resigned. But realpolitic and exigency counts more than morality these days, so he took back the resignation within a day.
Question: who will take the physical, material and corporal responsibility for turning men into photos on wall?
After all, somebody made a mess of the project. A big mess. Somebody had also made a mess at all the earlier messes on different lines of the same project.
The political class has an answer: inquiry commissions have been set up. The truth will come out soon and “action” then will be initiated against the guilty, as Urban Development Minister S Jaipal Reddy told the nation through Parliament.
Question: who will the action be initiated against? No one has been booked, after all. The police have registered cases of culpable homicide (or murder, as I prefer to out it, shorn of the cover that the pretentious word seems to offer) against ‘unknown persons’.
There you are then: somebody messed up for sure but bet your salary of October 2009 that no name will ever come out.
If it was homicide, or murder, of six young men, sure. But there are no murderers. No one is culpable.
Who needs culpability anyway? After all, there are too many of us in this country. A few funerals do not matter, but for the immediate family members.
Damages, after all, have been paid for those funeral services.
May be Azad in his stuck-LP mode is right: bring down the population and we might start caring for each other.
