11 highlights
-
You can bet on formidable candour from the grand old man of letters, Khushwant Singh, to tell you that he is actually curious to find out how flattering or uncharitable his obituary would be.
-
The man has come out with a new book, and you might remember what he said when Oxford University Press published the 2004 edition of his 1963 classic, A History of the Sikhs, and even wrote about it four years later in 2008: “‘Being published by the Oxford University Press is like being married to a duchess; the honour is somewhat greater than the pleasure’, said a writer who had made the grade. I am pleased with myself because it has provided me with a harem of three duchesses.”
-
In the process, some obituaries leave a mark themselves and become a part of history. So did Pandit Nehru’s “The light has gone out” address to the nation on All India Radio after Mahatma Gandhi’s assassination on 30 January, 1948.
-
There are flashes of good obituary writing in print now and then. But there are two clear signs of roadblocks in its evolution.
-
One, the editorial decisions on whose deaths to reflect upon (and whom to leave to rest in peace) and the consistency in carrying obituaries have been quite arbitrary.
-
There is another aspect which can’t get unnoticed in this regard. Newsmagazines in India don’t have a regular obituary column for each week/ fortnight/ month. Having that could give them greater space for consistently chronicling the life and times of distinguished people who passed away in the corresponding period.
-
It is significant to note that the regular obituary column in The Economist is the one which many of its readers look forward to reading each week. That’s quite cruel an expectation to have, but the newsmagazine as well as its readers have made allowance for the certainities of nature and time in no uncertain terms.
-
But historiographical value is something that an obituary should be aware of, and that’s the point that Peter Utley was making when he said: “An obituary should be an exercise in contemporary history, not a funeral oration”.
-
Of late, public intellectual and leading columnist, Pratap Bhanu Mehta can be credited with writing one of the most insightful obituaries which has appeared in English Press. Sample the obituary he wrote in The Indian Express two days after the death of Abid Hussain.
-
Pardon me a philosophical flourish, but can’t resist saying that death is the clearest expression of the absurdity of life.
-
Good obituaries elevate the banal incidence of death to humanise the journalistic narrative of the times. Your papers and magazines are doing that, few and far between. More lives need to revisited. More stories told. Some sense to be made.