Responses to a Death

                                                                   Responses to a Death

Many years ago, at least two decades, I remember reading an opinion piece by a socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer (she became a celebrity because she was a socialite, and became a writer because she was a celebrity, and I read her piece because she was all three!) bemoaning that funeral processions in India of political leaders were so unseemly (her perspective); all that breast beating (as in Tamil Nadu) was not befitting the final send-off. It brings the dignity the dead deserves on his death down, way down. It must be a sombre and silent affair. She must have called it all faux emotions and compared it to the essentially anodyne process (she must have seen or heard of) in western countries, and cast her lot with the latter.

Basically, faux emotions or anodyne proceedings, which do you prefer?

I am giving my readers a few photographs of the death of two different leaders within five years of each other, one in the then Madras, India and the other in Washington D.C., USA. These show the manifestation of culture in two different societies, one Western and the other, in a significant corner of India, Tamil Nadu. The Western one is from 1963, and the other wasC N Annadurai’s in Chennai. Without further ado, I offer the pictures below.

 Take a look at the mere size of the crowds. Understand that in the 1960s, India’s population was at least three times that of US’s. The area of India is one third of that of the US (including Alaska and Hawaii). 

Now, try taking in a more reasoned look at the same photographs. The distance covered by the funeral procession of C N Annadurai was 6 km, and it was much greater than that of John F. Kennedy, 10 km.

The density of the crowd in Madras is definitely greater than ten times that in Washington D.C. Accounting for the factor of 5/3 for the distance, the total crowd estimated at the final resting place of C N Annadurai was (as per the caption on one of the photos) 15 million, and in Washington D.C., the total along the route was 800,000. I will bring one more fact to your attention. C N Annadurai was the Chief Minister of the state of Tamil Nadu and John F. Kennedy was the president of the whole country, the US.

Ignore all those numbers and facts that do nothing but lie. One must make informed judgements; in this case it would include social importance of observances, including that of at funerals.

I would like to ask why she did not compare one of the other western funeral observances with her standard candela of Anglo-American observances. Here, I have in mind the Irish Wake that is quite celebratory of a well-lived life. 

The lives of both C N Annadurai and John F. Kennedy were not fully lived. But, even as merely the chief minister of a state of India, he made a mark that has benefitted and continue to benefit everyone, millions more, including the subalterns. One cannot claim the same for John F. Kennedy. Indeed, he ignored Blacks as they received zero candela of light. It was left to Lyndon B. Johnson to direct the torch towards Blacks and the poor.

Does the socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer not know that one can compare only the comparables? C N Anandurai’s death brought forth such emotions in people, more than a dozen people (I am sure I remember it right) lost their lives travelling on train tops despite repeated attempts by the engine driver and the guard to get them off. They merely wanted to see their beloved Anna (elder brother) one last time. They were, instead, mashed/guillotined by the top steel members of the through-type truss bridge that crossed River Cauvery in Tiruchirappalli. Has the socialite-cum-celebrity-cum-writer hear of such gruesome incidents elsewhere during a Western funeral? This never happened for John F. Kennedy, James E. Carter, and even Ronald Reagan. I did not think so.

I am not going to claim that Americans did not feel for any of their presidents as much as what people of Tamil Nadu felt for their chief minister, C N Annadurai. But, Western societies seem to think that wearing your emotions on your sleeves makes you week. I have nothing to say on that.

I can give you one instance that could etch in your mind the indelible image of Anna. One of my former colleagues was named Kanchidurai, where “Kanchi” refers to the place of birth of C N Annadurai (Kanchipuram). It must have been one of his father’s ways of remembering his beloved late leader.

Another instance popped into my mind just as I was finalizing this write-up. One of my classmates in my Ph.D programme named his first born Ronald, after President Ronald Reagan. Such memorializing cuts across societies, maybe.

Yet, one cannot take incidences under different individual ethos and social mores and compare those using raw data, information, what have you. The writer is a socialite but is not competent enough to comment on the sociology of any particular society−which, by default is not the one in which she floats−that abrades her sense of the right response to a situationsteered by the unaffordable fashions of her mind.    

Raghuram Ekambaram