The dead stay dumb

May10, 2009.
I was reminded of this James Hadley Chase title. Of course it meant something else in the thriller but the dead cannot complain and how does it matter what the common man thinks.
Grotesque, macabre that's the thought that comes to mind when you sees a corpse being carried on the footboard of a cycle rickshaw. We are dreaming of becoming world leaders and yet this...
Have we not been reading, over the past couple of months, about the wealth accumulated by our netas (our politicians). What about the millions of rupees from their area development fund going abegging.
Disrespect for the dead can be expected when the living don't matter. I was shocked, not because I'd not seen this before, but because I had not seen this in some years. Once I saw two bodies, shrouded of course in white cloth, being carried one on top of the other. One would expect this dirty habit to have been done away with when you think of the millions of vehicles that ply on the roads today.
Broken roads, smelly garbage heaps and other civic problems remain because the people who are there to improve things, the bureaucrats and netas, ministers and civic authorities are the very people who are not affected by these problems.