Some deaths are more equal

This is not in support or condemnation of the Charles Hebdo incident but more an introspection of our attitude towards crime and death…

From the milk that we drink to the ‘health food’ that we eat to the ‘greens’ that we feed our children, we hear of the horror stories of poison and contamination! Each of us are having a slow death through the food we eat and horrifically, we are also slowly killing our children with ounces of poison on a daily basis…and yet for this issue which affects every single person amongst the billion+ population of India-  no candle light march, no Facebook campaign, not even a media movement has been undertaken to rid the country of these evils.

The country’s roads and traffic rules are in shambles and each time we step on the road, you are never assured of reaching you destination…if you are a pedestrian; chances of you being beaten down by a motor bike on the footpath is immensely high..if you are a bike rider; chances of you being crushed by a rickety government bus cannot be ruled out…if you are driving a car; chances of a cow jump followed by a fatal swerve are oddly against you…And these probabilities are so certain and yet we do not have a nationwide campaign to address traffic violations….simple civilized rules to follow traffic signal and follow lane discipline could avoid thousands of deaths on our roads….Take this a step further and think about the horrendously placed speed breakers and humps on our roads….some of them marked..some unmarked…some unscientific..some of Himalayan heights….creating some crucial life-death instances on the road. To add to that is our extremely difficult judicial and policing systems…given a choice no Samaritan would like to take a bleeding person to the hospital..no law abiding citizen would like to report an accident to the police…all adding up to a fatal network of roads and infrastructure that kills more people than connect them together.

Take the state of our health care system and we may need to hang our head in shame..How many of us would like to step into a government run hospital in case of an illness? Wouldn’t we prefer to burn holes in our pocket and seek help from the ‘professional’ network of hospitals? Despite being funded and managed by the government, the state of such hospitals are deplorable not to mention the scary stories of deaths in such hospitals…And even if the well heeled amongst us have access to the best healthcare facilities in the country..are we sure that the treatment given to us is what it is supposed to be? Are we sure that the organs that we owned before the surgery is intact when we step out of the operation theatre?

These are the fundamental rights to living…we can’t anticipate death from the food we eat, the medicines we intake and definitely not from a simple stroll down the neighbourhood ally. And yet in our country chances of such deaths are so high and yet we are immuned to this risk…and almost have come to terms with it as part of our living.

Our countrymen would rise up and show solidarity for the journalists killed in Paris…the whole world is spinning around this horror story..How can one life be more precious than the other? These same countrymen have been through the worst brutal killings in the past few years and yet where is the strength..where is the empathy..where is the solidarity against such killings?

We have the time to introspect on the evils of a 3 hour movie on the entire generation and to violently react against such ‘influence’ but we cannot spare a moment to assess the damage of the ‘posion’ that we eat on a daily basis let alone the time or the energy to protest…an irony that definitely beats my sense of logic!