Thousands in India die everyday. Some in their comfortable home, peacefully. Some due to hunger and some due to cold. Some are killed in the road accidents or murdered for petty reasons like money or love. Some are also murdered for their caste or religion in the name of God. Some sadly kill themselves for bad marks, bad love or like the many farmers, just due to bad rains. Each of this death is sad. Each of it needs to be avoided. When each of it happens, we need to hang our heads in shame for not being able to avoid it. Better health care, better support system, better education and whatever is possible by the human kind. What else do we strive to achieve?
All this comes from the recognition of the value that life has, the power it yields to any human and the limitless possibilities that a human is capable of when he/she is filled with life. Often, I have joked that I live to eat and yes, I am a foodie and good food is a great inspiration for me to live. But it is just one inspiration and there are hundreds of other reasons to live your life fully. Places to visit, people to meet, adventures to live through and what not.
Between all this, how can we accept a planned murder, even if that murder is of the most heinous person in the world. The person here is just one actor in the whole circumstance. His/her life ends there and there is nothing more to it. Buried/burnt that body feels nothing. What is more important is the society this act leaves behind. What happens to the society? Should the society celebrate this planned murder? Does the society become more violent after this act or does it become more peaceful. What is the emotion that such an act generate? Does it unify the society or does it instigate people to do more such heinous acts? The killed person is now relieved of impact of any of this and it is the society which now has to come to term with this act.
Yakub Menon or Ajmal Kasab, each individual while committing their crimes had a choice to not do it. The results of their act was very deplorable, very heinous, very cruel. They made their choice mainly because they could not accept the vastness of humanity. Society while executing the person also has a choice to make. There is no glory in killing another human being, especially in cold blooded, planned execution. It tells us that we as humans have given up on the fact that the person can change, that we have nothing more to reason with him/her, that in the vastness of the humanity, we cannot find a single place for that particular life to fit in. I cannot agree to this hopelessness in humanity.
Following is an intriguing para from the George Orwell’s essay on Hanging:
It is curious, but till that moment I had never realized what it means to destroy a healthy, conscious man. When I saw the prisoner step aside to avoid the puddle, I saw the mystery, the unspeakable wrongness, of cutting a life short when it is in full tide. This man was not dying, he was alive just as we were alive. All the organs of his body were working — bowels digesting food, skin renewing itself, nails growing, tissues forming — all toiling away in solemn foolery. His nails would still be growing when he stood on the drop, when he was falling through the air with a tenth of a second to live. His eyes saw the yellow gravel and the grey walls, and his brain still remembered, foresaw, reasoned — reasoned even about puddles. He and we were a party of men walking together, seeing, hearing, feeling, understanding the same world; and in two minutes, with a sudden snap, one of us would be gone — one mind less, one world less.
