The Hindu Business Line : Terrestrial constructs

Tuesday morning’s papers carried the powerful photograph of Dr Manmohan Singh paying his last respects to a predecessor, Chandra Shekhar, at a cremation ground in New Delhi, with a number of people from the Services ostensibly standing guard over the body. The word ‘powerful’ has been used because what the picture basically portrayed, at least to this writer, was the inevitability of the passage of time and the sea-change it can bring in its wake.

The caption described Dr Singh as the Prime Minister and Chandra Shekhar, the Young Turk of yore, as a former Prime Minister. What the photograph, along with the caption, heavily underscored in the mind was that such appellations were nothing more than ‘terrestrial constructs’ (as the Governor of West Bengal, Mr Gopalkrishna Gandhi, once wrote with reference to the use of the term ‘His Excellency’ by a terminally ill Somenath Hore in Santiniketan).

Sans intrinsic value

What the highly sensitive Mr Gandhi probably meant was that such classifications were created by Man and had no intrinsic value — value which would transcend the boundaries of time and space and relate to the one and only ‘reality’ which would be as concrete as the planet Earth doing its rounds around the Sun in a galaxy named by Man as the Milky Way or, come to think of it, the keyboard of the computer with the help of which this piece is being written.

And why only single out the term Prime Minister or, for that matter, President, Chief Minister, Governor, Chairman, Managing Director, et al? Being called a father, mother, brother, wife, son, etc, are also further examples of ̵ 6;terrestrial constructs’ in action, the description in the latter case relating to relationships within a family (the ‘same blood’, etc).

The problem is that all this is of fleeting relevance and has no choice but to yield precedence to the passage of time, the ultimate truth (as far as living things are concerned, which includes Man) being, in a word, Death, or the cessation of life. One would imagine (and it is not the easiest thing to imagine) is that the simplest cell has the simplest structure of a brain embedded in it. Since a brain is essentially a mechanism to measure and integrate ‘response’ to both ‘external’ and ‘internal’ disturbance, it also carries within it the germ of a Being. When life "ends" the support structure of the associated Being collapses – and the Being is extinguished.

The only certainty

But is it? There is a huge, unending debate on this point that itself is the creation of the human mind (which, curiously, in the case of an individual, represents the Being). Even if the Being is not extinguished, there is something called biological death — and the thread of this piece is that Death is the only certainty that a living organism faces the moment it is "born". Even Prime Ministers have to call it a day at some point of time, the truth being that, at that precise point of time, their remains in what may be called "realistic", biological terms have exactly the same value as those of any other lifeless body anywhere else.

Death is, essentially, the Great Equaliser or Leveller, restoring the original parity among human beings — that is, the parity at birth, at the very beginning of the journey. It is also the only certain destination that both the Prince and the Pauper are creeping towards from the moment they are born.

Ranabir Ray Choudhury

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