Empathy

Few weeks back, a WhatsApp message came on my mobile which said “Never thought, death too will come with a made in China label on it”. The message obviously had a trail of laughter emoticons and was made with a fun intent. Death is a dark word that is often used extremely casually particularly by the Indian community. “You will learn once I am dead” is a statement used quite commonly in our households by parents. Lovers making a point of their importance through the same word is something we have seen zillions of times on movies and daily soaps. But is death really that easy to face? Can it ever be a means of remorse or romance or anything other than emptiness? With such statements made so casually, all I think is that we somewhere agree to the point that our lives are cheap and may become worthwhile only when there is absolute absence of it.

The list of ludicrous messages on Covid-19 Corona virus that have inundated our mobiles and the web reinstate this thought. I hear these text messages making a deafening sound of an empathetically degrading society. How much more hollow we as a society have planned to become? On one hand we see the heart wrenching photographs of coffin laden military trucks of Italy and on the other hand there are variety of jokes and videos on websites as useless as TikTok over the same ghastly virus. This virus has not just exposed the helplessness of human immune system but also shown a mirror to the lack of empathy in us. It is time we start working on both. Let’s try being a little more humane than the last day. A poet rightly said ” कुछ लिख कर सो कुछ गढ़ कर सो, तू जिस जगह जागा सवेरे उस जगह से बढ़कर सो.”