By Monmi Roaver Pariat
This is with regard to Rasputin’s Bismarck’s “Is burning the dead a healthy practice?” (ST Aug 23, 2017). Let me not waste any more time (and valuable ink for that matter) in vying the utterly abhorrent, bigoted and incongruous nature with which the writer makes his underlying callous statement. Any given writer presumably knows that to lay the path for the readers to follow, one must be au courant with the correct and valid facts so as to seamlessly bring home whatever point there is to make. If one, so to say, happens to breach this given protocol, then the result would be baseless conceit and not to forget humiliation. This is exactly what the writer did, and did fail oh so miserably!
The writer got off on a perplexingly bedazzling foot by quoting a verse from the Bible and thereafter stating that 21st century societies are just as dead as they could ever be simply because they are too caught up in their day to day activities, say work? Is that what he is implying? That people are way past dead to be able to live life the way it is supposed to be lived? One might never know. He then seems to go out of his way and take a dig at mainland India and its mindset in terms of television and movies with a somewhat stern abrasion to Akshay Kumar’s latest production work, “Toilet: Ek Prem Katha”, once again leaving the readers completely perplexed. And just as any connoisseur of seamless segueing, the writer makes a not so subtle transition from the above mentioned heresies to actually talking of people (“Christians and non-Christians”) taking a few hours off, if not a whole day, from their ‘busy’ schedules to mourn the demise of their loved ones, which arises strictly from feelings of sympathy, empathy and sentimentality. But then again one might never know what goes on inside the mind of a person innately deprived of any speck of human emotions.
To add fuel to the fire, to continue with the baseless denigration, the writer finally gets to his point which is so carefully thought out in his piece title. The writer greatly opines that cremation is definitely no way of going out simply because there is no ‘last goodbye’ in doing so. Thoughts? The writer seems to have this mildly absurd idea that people who are cremated, dead of course, have no means of hearing their loved ones say their last goodbyes (rest in peace, goodbye , au revoir etc), again simply because they are reduced to ‘nothing but ashes’. But as for the people who are buried, who also happen to be as ‘dead’ as the people who are cremated, well maybe they are still equipped with that one sense which enables them to hear all the RIPs showered upon them after their death. Possibility? The writer again digresses a bit away from the relevant topic with the juxtaposition of cremations and burning effigies.
All in all the writer is at the pinnacle of his intertwining details days, jumping from one anonymous subject to the other. If he had given it a few more minutes’ worth of thought, then maybe he would have known that eco-friendly crematoriums use comparatively less wood as compared to old cremation processes. If he had given it more thought he would have known that as about now most of the population of the world prefer cremation over burial as consequence to lack of burial space and the cost which is associated with it. If he had given it more thought then maybe he would have known that “Hindus and non-Christians” (in India in particular and the world in general) are certainly not the only religious faiths which adhere to the final rites of ‘cremation’. What about Buddhists? Jains? Sikhs? A bit more thought and he would have known that even China more or less adheres to cremation. But to err is human, right Mister?
And as much as I want to deliver on the sanctity of cremation with respect to the varied faiths adhering to this practice, I choose not to, simply because I see no worth of doing so in this present predicament.