Accident or suicide, time for blame game

Content warning, trigger warning: Contains mention of suicide and death by road accident.

Is it a lack of personal accountability or a distrust in the system as a whole that has us pointing fingers at everyone but ourselves? A moral code goes beyond the prescribed, to what is practised. It is only when a public tragedy occurs that issues like responsibility, guilt, culpability come into the picture. As a nation we’d rather bury our head in the sand than go for a forensic examination of what went wrong. Ignoring the ‘why’ is a habit, leading to faulty diagnosis.

Understandably, any sudden rip in normalcy stuns those affected into incoherence; but the existence of underlying fissures that make these rips inevitable and organic need a more leisurely examination. Rather than pin it on an individual, the collective conscience makes everyone an equal participant. In this process, A or B no longer matters in a personal capacity; rather they are examples of us, making us interchangeable. If it can happen to him, it can happen to me. The sheer osmosis of co-existence dictates that we are prototypes of each other – related by species if not by blood. We are sharing a planet at this point in time, fellow travellers conjoined by terrain, walking under the same sky.

The road accident in Delhi on January 1 is more horrific to those who are able to recoil from it and maintain a mental distance in an ‘us and them’ way. As if the victim and the accused alighted on earth on that fateful day from outer space. Some are able to tread the superior path, and are the loudest in their condemnation. Anjali Singh who died sometime after midnight becomes more than a casualty; she is an errant daughter who stayed out too late, perhaps drank and partied with men, made her own way home at an unearthly hour. Her friend Nidhi, who ran back home and kept quiet for three days till the police came knocking at her door, is the personification of betrayal - and not of distrust in the state machinery. Through all raging pontifications, the abject surety of our own saintliness keeps us going.