Silence of the Tombs

Today is Holy Saturday for Christians all over the world. Yesterday was Good Friday which my blog commemorated in a post titled Good Friday and Some Arithmetic. My enduring friend Jose Maliekal commented on the post thus: 

I take Maliekal seriously for many reasons. So I spent some time thinking about Holy Saturday and what descended into my consciousness was a profound silence, the silence of a tomb, a tomb that held the dead body of a young man whose goodness could not survive in the world of powerful people. That is the helplessness of Holy Saturday. True, Easter will follow it. What follows Easter, however, will be yet another religion, its mumbo-jumbo and the inevitable power games. I’d prefer the silence of Holy Saturday.

You’re right, Maliekal, Arikuzha’s nights are silent, eerily so. [For the benefit of other readers, Arikuzha is my village.] I miss the sounds of crickets that used to resound in the nights here until a decade back. Development, Vikas, has driven away even crickets. The butterflies and dragonflies and fireflies, which were in hundreds once upon a time here, have all vanished. Our ‘development’ is their extinction. We have buried them in some tombs never to resurrect.

It rained here yesterday in the evening though for a short while. It was a welcome rain because the temperature was hovering near to 40 degrees Celsius for weeks and even the grass and weeds had begun to wither. As soon as the rain stopped, a bird cried from a tree and I was standing outside my house. No one would have missed the note of joy in the cry of that bird. I wished I could bring more joy into the world of those little creatures. I wondered why we are hellbent on driving out joy from the world. Why do we insist on sending all goodness to some tomb or another?

Holy Saturday does have its trigonometry, Maliekal. When I thought about it, what struck me is the inextricable interrelationship among those ratios. You can never separate sine from cosine from tangent in trigonometry. Trigonometry is essentially about relationships though mathematicians will call them by other names such as ratios. It is certain relationships that they buried on the first Holy Saturday.

We have continued to bury them up to this day. We buried our rainclouds, our forests, our lakes…

You know very well why Bengaluru is a parched city now. Because we buried her lakes long ago and built apartments in their places and called it development. Bengaluru’s engineers boasted about the marvel they had created for bringing the Kaveri’s waters to the city’s skyscrapers. What the engineers failed to understand was the trigonometry of the cosmos, the intertwining dance of ratios. You can’t eliminate sine and retain cosine, you see.

But we did that. Not just in Bengaluru. All over the country. All over the world, in fact. Let me, however, focus on our country which aspires to be the world’s teacher, the Viswa Guru.

Every sixth urban Indian lives in a slum today. We are speaking about a country that is highlighting itself as some trillion-dollar economy. Eleven of our biggest cities have one-third of their population subsisting in the subhuman conditions of filthy slums. Our Prime Minister boasts in a propaganda ad that he is giving free food to over 80 crore citizens. What he is admitting indirectly is that more than half of the Indians are made beggars by him. 

Home in an Indian city

That’s quite true too. Do you know why? Let me give you just an example.

The country’s resources are being sold to one or two individuals part by part. The Singrauli coalfields in Madhya Pradesh and the Hasdeo Arand forests in Chhattisgarh went to a friend of the Prime Minister’s. This friend got many such gifts from the Prime Minister and flourished to become one of the richest men in the world. In the process of making him a trillionaire, thousands of adivasis and forest dwellers lost their homes. Who cares when the country’s economic graphs project high and higher GDPs?

This man, the PM’s friend, gives back to the country a meagre 6% of his profit as revenue while other players in the field are returning as much as 60%. Rungta Sons Pvt Ltd, for example, provides a revenue of 60%, Indermani Mineral Pvt Ltd yields 52%, and the share of Bull Mining Pvt Ltd is 40%. Why does the richest man in the world get away giving a beggarly return of 6%? And where do all those people who survived on the forests go? To pathetic slums! Some trigonometric ratios are not right.

When a few decide to live their life king-size, the others are trampled underfoot. Does anyone hear the cry of those trampled anymore? Those cries are drowned in the noise of slogans and jingles.  

Wild animals have started coming out of the forests in Kerala. In 2022-23, nearly 9000 human-wildlife conflicts occurred in the state. About a hundred people lost their lives. We hear of some wild creature attacking people every day in Kerala now. Ratios gone wrong, again, is the reason. We haven’t respected certain relationships. We have sent too many relationships to their tombs. Maybe, this Easter, we can think of really resurrecting those relationships.

Let me end this with an old video that speaks more eloquently even today than the rhetoric of the Viswa Guru. Gaon Chodab Nahin...