Coming to terms with prospect of demise

There would seem to be a certain fascination with death, especially so when it touches the high and the mighty, the famous and the infamous, the ranks of celebrity, "the beautiful people" and even the illustrious obscure, that goes beyond the purely morbid. It has been said -- and only half in jest -- that many readers in western countries tend to skim over the sports, comics and obituary pages in a newspaper before moving to serious news and commentaries that are assuredly more exacting on the mind. The Economist, in the opinion of many the premier news weekly of the world, invariably devotes one page of every issue to an obituary.

In our formative years, teachers and well-intentioned elders -- no doubt to both encourage and motivate -- would regale us with tales of two scholars, friends, colleagues and contemporaries who competed and excelled in the same academic discipline -- Physics-Mathematics. They were, of course, Professors Satyen Bose and Meghnad Saha. Two generations later there were similar stories of friendship and competition and also academic excellence and high achievement concerning two other individuals gifted in another discipline -- economic science -- namely Professors Amartya Sen and Sukhomoy Chakravarty. The Delhi School of Economics perhaps scaled new heights of excellence when the likes of Amartya Sen, Sukhomoy Chakravarty and Jagadish Bhagwati adorned its faculty.

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Sukhomoy Chakravarty and Amartya Sen were students together at Presidency College. Later Sen went up to Cambridge for higher studies where his tutor was the formidably cerebral Joan Robinson. Many believe to this day that she deserved the Nobel as much as anybody else. At a tutorial class Joan Robinson had once observed somewhat tartly, apropos of something or other, that Indians were too rude, the Japanese too polite but that the Chinese had achieved a right balance. Sen barely restrained himself from responding, arguing with his instincts that any protest or argument would only vindicate Prof Robinson! From the Delhi School Sen went on to prestigious academic positions in London, Harvard and then as Master of Trinity. Sukhomoy did his doctoral dissertation with Jan Tinbergen, who incidentally shared with Ragnar Frisch the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics when the award was introduced in 1969. Much of his career was spent at the Delhi School, except for brief stints as Visiting Professor abroad and when he served as Member of the Planning Commission. He was also Chairman of the Economic Advisory Council of successive Prime Ministers of India. In August 1990 when Sukhomoy, who had a heart condition, died the Independent of London carried an obituary by Amartya Sen. It was less an obituary than a tribute or a celebration, as it were, of the life of a friend and colleague. Not too many future Nobel Laureates, I should think, have written obituaries.

Ahmed Shah Bokhari was versatile and catholic in his talents and achievements. He was successively and successfully an educationist (professor and Principal, Lahore Govt. College), impresario (the first Indian Director General of All India Radio), diplomat (Pakistan's first PR to the UN), and international civil servant (Under Secretary for Public Information at the UN). To many of his admirers and students, and they were legion, he was an "oracle of awesome resonance". Robert Frost wrote and addressed to him a couplet:

"From Iron
Tools and Weapons
To Ahmed S. Bokhari
Nature within her inmost self divides
To trouble men with having to take sides."

To Dag Hammarskjold he was a man of the highest culture. Tunisia, in a rare show of honour, named a street after him in Tunis for his forceful advocacy of Tunisian independence at the UN. When he died suddenly, the New York Times, in an extraordinary gesture, mourned his loss editorially as the passing of a "citizen of the world."

Sir N.R. Pillai and S.B. Hatch Barnwell were both of the elite ICS. They would fall in the category of the illustrious obscure. NR had served as Secretary General at the Indian Foreign Office during 1952-60. Years back at a small gathering a former Indian diplomat, who had been his private secretary, reminisced about NR's old world charm, courtliness and imperturbability. She was not certain if he was still alive at that time. He was, and living in London after retirement, as we learned some years later when his lengthy obituary appeared in the London Times. Many in Bangladesh would still remember Hatch Barnwell who spent most of his career in the then East Pakistan. He held several important positions, Commissioner, Chairman of the Agricultural Development Corporation and Member, Board of Revenue. Tall, slightly bent and spare of frame he was very recognizable as he cycled to and back from work even after having reached the senior echelons of bureaucracy. He was also one of the last of his kind, almost an anachronism, an Englishman holding a position of responsibility in the government of a former colony. After retirement he served as a consultant in international agencies. When he passed on, the London Times carried an obituary.

It would be a reasonable assumption that to a high proportion of readers of the Times both NR and Hatch Barnwell were unfamiliar names. Perhaps the paper wished simply to underscore a continuity of links between nations at the individual or personal level. An obituary proper is more than an entry in a Who's Who or even a standard CV. It is also an evocation of the times, when the subject lived and achieved whatever it was that entitled him to an obituary, which is written well ahead of time usually and merely updated periodically. When the moment comes for it to be used, only the gaps are filled in.

One time president of Iraq and currently the most famous POW in the world is beyond question Saddam Hussein. Whether or not he passes on eventually due to natural causes, from the business end of a firing squad or from the gallows, it is a fair assumption, in the present circumstances, that obituarists the world over are updating his obituary, as also those of many others, but with a greater sense of urgency. It will have been recorded that he was for over twenty years the president of Iraq, that he lived by the sword for much of his working life and was a far from exemplary person or leader of people. The less than savoury aspects of his past notwithstanding, he was not always anathema to the West. Viewers who saw television footage of his capture, his unkempt hair and teeth solicitously being examined presumably for lice and cavities respectively, may well have included the odd obituary writer, and likewise among those who saw still photos showing him being unceremoniously pulled out of his underground hiding place. Some among them may even have been reminded of something that Abraham Lincoln once said as a young man, years before his election as president. In a speech in Springfield in1839, Lincoln had asserted with absolute assurance: "Many free countries have lost their liberty, and ours may lose hers: but if she shall, be it my proudest plume, not that I was the last to desert, but that I never deserted her".

There is surely precious little in common between the greatest of US presidents and Saddam Hussein. It would thus be a supreme irony, indeed a miracle of sorts, if words uttered by Lincoln in respect of himself were, at any time and by anyone, also to be considered apposite for Saddam, even in a moment of compassion! Would this be part of a planned scenario or simply a coincidence or just one of those things, a consequence of a policy or decision that could not be foreseen? Time will perhaps one day provide the answer.