Death may be humanity’s great equaliser, but the inequalities suffered in life become inequalities in dying as well. This is probably reflected most in the death of the young research scholar Vemula Rohith, an event rendered all the more tragic by the fact that one so young took his own life.
And he had sounded so right about the world around him when he wrote, quite brilliantly, in his gut-wrenching suicide note —“The value of a man was reduced to his identity… to a vote, to a number, to a thing. Never was a man treated as a mind, as a glorious thing made of star dust in every field. In studies, on streets, in politics and in dying and living.”
It may have been his life experience of sheer disgust at the system when he wrote those lines, but, sadly, all people were forced to see in the days after his death was his identity by caste.
You could blame our politicians for that because all of them are past masters at the art of seeing in every man a voter and in every group of them a vote bank. Is this what we are reduced to after 68 years of freedom and nearly to the day of 65 years in being a sovereign Republic?
Seeing the unseemly haste with which our politicos descended on the former campus of the departed soul, it becomes very easy to judge where we are as a nation today, much like Rohith had spelt out.
We have had decades of affirmative action or positive discrimination to try and find the balance to correct the historical imbalance of the ancient caste system. Rohith did not need the help of such reservation to get to where he was as a research scholar. His troubled soul would, however, suggest that his hunt for a meaning to life was distorted by his experience in dealing with prejudice. This is by no means an Indian monopoly although caste feelings might well be a particular perversion of ours.
There is discrimination everywhere in the world and it exists in different forms.
What such discrimination does to young minds — which are purer than ours and sees right and wrong and just and unjust far more clearly than we do because we have been inured for years to the world’s inconsistencies - is unfathomable.
Sadly, in Rohtih’s case, it has led to his taking his own life. Psychologists who read his notes would probably conclude he may have already started thinking of ending his life.
‘One day you will find me in history. In the bad light, in the yellow pages. And you will wish I was wise. But at the night of that day, you will remember me, feel me and you will breathe out a smile. And on that day, I will resurrect.”
Ironically, as a friend of his pointed out, “It haunts me. He would speak about death and the life of death. He must be sitting somewhere here laughing at the drama that’s happening. He must be thinking, ‘I couldn’t do this in life, and now look at this, after I’m gone, ’It was only through his death that he could sprad this message.”
Take away the politics and all you see is the loss of a young life, snuffed out by society’s imperfections. If Rohith’s death leads us to a place that would be fairer to all and, more importantly, lead to democratization of the campuses, it would not have been in vain.
But those who know real life and seen it all their adult lives as it were would know otherwise. Even so, the posters post-Rohith’s death were inspirational – We shall overcome. I really wish we would conquer prejudice.
