Making Mockery of Death

 

First phase of Covid pandemic in India (Y2020) will be remembered for mass migration and huge trouble and atrocities for the poor population. It was a pathetic phase for the ‘labor class’, who lost their jobs, did not get public transportation to return to their native places, had to become beggars to get food and were hated for merely being ‘visible’. A lot will be forgotten out of convenience, but the hell India went through can’t be denied. On the contrary, the second phase/wave (Y2021) saw mass deaths of middle and upper class young people where money could not save them; rich people begging for “Oxygen beds” at hospitals, and young people dying sudden deaths, as if in a random manner. If there was an apocalyptic moment in Generation X/Y India, that was it. Everyone saw with one’s eyes that death was a possibility and it was real. Although only in a few months after the second wave passed, life returned to normalcy, as if nothing happened. Only, if you come across a few social media accounts of dead/disappeared people, you get to stop and reflect, before moving on. I would recall two such cases.

First, there was a guy whose first name was Rahul. He was an assistant movie director, a bright young handsome Gujarati guy in his 30s, lived in South Delhi; was married too. I came across his profile only when people were using his name as a ‘Hashtag’ to pay their condolences. Scrolling through few of his last posts, it was understood that first he had Covid with breathing difficulties and he wrote many social media posts asking any politician or authority to give him any Oxygen bed in a hospital. He wrote few posts in Hindi, expressing frustration, including cuss words which perhaps were because it was totally “cool” to use those. In the end he got a hospital bed with Oxygen but by that time he was not improving at all. In a couple of days at hospital, his situation became worse. He wrote a post in the morning that “I could have survived if I got a hospital bed earlier”. And then he died by evening. It was shocking, cruel and totally inhuman. Out of his last few social media posts, several had cuss words. I guess he won’t have spoken like that if he really knew he was going to die. Perhaps he thought he would recover and survive.

The second person was a girl I came across in news only today. After she died, Anand Mahindra who is always on social media had written, “your death won’t go in vein”. She was again a bright young girl like the earlier guy. Initially she was not getting a bed in hospital too and when she was admitted to a hospital, her doctor wrote a social media post appreciating her strength and zeal for life and also posted a video where she was seen waving and dancing while listening to music and sitting in her hospital bed with her Oxygen mask on. It was pathetic. What kind of a doctor (she was a lady doctor, so perhaps tried to make a good feminist story out of her female patient) would do that to her patient? The social media post was expected to get people’s prayers for her life. And then there was a reply to that post from the lady patient’s husband or some family member, writing that after 3 hours post this social media post/video, her condition deteriorated fast, and she died. Once again news portals shared the same video and picture where the girl is singing, dancing in her hospital bed, with a title that the brave girl is dead. I don’t know what benefit the patient or her doctor got by posting that video few hours before her death. It was almost making mockery of death and of medical profession too!

Why is it necessary to share social media post till our last breath? Making a social media post for help to get a hospital bed is still ok, though lot of people won’t even do that, but to share video from death bed and trying to become famous that way, seeking blessings (as if those really work), are all so wasteful. Perhaps if the girl survived, this episode won’t be seen in the wrong light but now that she died (last year this time in May month), it looks all so bad. No matter what, she should have been resting and not dancing, and her doctor should be busy thinking about her patients rather than making videos of dying patients and posting on the social media. Such things make social media appear as a dark evil place which is not good for noble people.

Hope everyone moves on and social media users are more sensible about the kind of impact their posts and videos create on their audiences’ minds. Death is supposed to have some dignity and a personal event and making mockery out of it by posting stuff on social media from those last moments is wrong.

- Rahul