No matter how many rules are laid down, we will still kill if we don’t respect each other, and are not empowered enough to act upon our volition
It has been a depressing August. We must never recover from the deaths of the 60 children in the wards of the State Government run Baba Raghav Das Medical College, Gorakhpur, that occurred within a span of four days this month.
As a dark reminder of the unequal distribution of healthcare in our country, while some of us enjoy the world’s finest luxury in Indian hospitals, 30 of our children died in the hospital in Gorakhpur due to lack of oxygen. While we pay a fortune for services at some hospitals in our metropolises, the contractor for oxygen cylinders had not been paid his dues by the hospital in Gorakhpur and had thus refrained from supplying the cylinders. While the value of medical tourism industry in India is projected to grow from 3 billion USD (2015) to 7 to 8 billion USD by 2020 as thousands fly down here for advanced treatments at low costs, 12 of our own children at BRD Medical College died within days due to acute encephalitis syndrome — a condition in which death comes in the most desperate conditions of mental confusion, disorientation, delirium, and coma. It is certainly the worst kind of death we can imagine for a child.
Yet this is nothing new. Every day hundreds die in India due to non availability of proper healthcare. Gorakhpur is not a shocker, it is a heartbreaking reminder that we live in a country that has the largest number of malnutritioned children in the world but one that is also among the top five for obese adults.
After the dust settles down on the news and all the analysis, in the silence of our minds many of us will simply pay homage, apologise to the children from whom we snatched life, and mourn their deaths. Death by every cause is depressing. Death anywhere is tragic.
Just a week after the deaths in Gorakhpur, on the lively la Rambla street in Barcelona, a van was driven into pedestrians, killing 13 and injuring at least 130 people. The driver of the van fled the attack on foot, then killed a 14th victim in order to steal his car and escape. While the perpetrators of the incident were immediately claimed by the terror group ISIl, the victims came from nearly three dozen countries from age three to age 80. Eight hours later, 68 miles away from Barcelona in Cambrils, another car attack left one woman dead and six injured, before the police shot dead the killers. In all the mayhem, innocent citizens were killed and injured in the name of religion.
This too is nothing new. According to the organisation The Religion of Peace, in the past 30 days alone there have been 156 attacks by Islamic groups in 27 countries in which 1,077 people were killed and 1,007 injured. And once again we mourned the death of innocents.
Our freedom to live is threatened everywhere. Where are we safeIJ Not in our homes, nor on open streets, and not even in the hospitals. There is something very wrong in the evolutionary trajectory of man if no matter where we are, and despite all our ‘modernity’, we become increasingly fearful of the safety of our own lives. Each time an avoidable massacre occurs, it angers us, it etches itself into our memory forever because it makes us immediately fear for our own and our loved ones’ safety, but it also makes us aware of our own terrifying gradual dehumanisation as we become more and more habituated to morbidity and death all around.
On the other hand, the freedom to kill — by deliberation or ignorance — is flourishing everywhere. Institutions of law and governance were established across centuries in tribes, kingdoms, nations, to put in place rules about what the individuals who are governed could and could not do. It was felt that these rules were needed for man to be free but also so he allows others to be free too, for the collectivity to live in harmony. Eventually society and religions also evolved and they too asked their members to follow their own sets of rules. Furthermore, the repercussions of not abiding by the rules of law, society, or religion have been dire, as proved by example each time. Man — who was born to roam free — was thus handcuffed by the rules of the law of his land, the society around him, and his faith if any, as well as pulled in several directions as the rules of these disparate sources did not always intersect. He was bound yet confused. Overall it raised the moral question regarding man’s absolute freedom — are we really free if we are actually bound by all these rulesIJ Ironically, it also raised another increasingly important question — what good are all these rules if despite them man still kills manIJ
At the very crux of our depleting freedom to live versus the increasing freedom to kill is the lack of education. By education, I do not mean merely schooling and fancy degrees. I am talking about the kind of education that makes individuals respect one another; the education that makes us think rationally and question anything that is given to us; the education that empowers us to be courageous and goad us to act according to our volition. In my opinion this education comes from home and society, more than it does from school (given the way education is meted out today in our schools). No matter how many rules laws, society, religion may lay down for all of us to live harmoniously, we will still kill if we do not respect each other, are not rational, and are not empowered enough to act upon our volition. Only if thus educated, the Government officials will know better than to disrespect the value of the lives of the poor in small hospitals, and terror groups might just be rational enough to overcome their blind brutal fervour. Rules alone will not hold them back from murder.
This is the kind of education our world desperately needs. And every parent and society in the world needs to contribute towards it, such that our progeny may at last be dissuaded to kill by deliberation, disrespect, and callousness. Else August 2017 will repeat itself again and yet again.
The writer is Chief Sustainability Officer for the group of companies, Jindal Steel and Power ltd.
She is a Global leadership Alumna of the World Economic Forum. miniya.chatterji@jindalsteel.com