Assigners of recorded deaths

Who records all deaths, if we care to exclude the religious allusions and mythologies?
It's the newspapers...

the words of the radio and the TV fade away, it's the printed words that remain... to be forgotten over the morning tea...

Almost every city has its newspapers, and all of these have their own pull-outs which they call city supplements... there's one compulsory space where they have to spell out little incidents, so matter-of-fact that they can't go into the pages, the editors feel, as stories...

— a five-year-old (who went to fetch his marble or ran after a kite you seldom get to watch in a concrete jungle, but this is not printed for lack of space) run over by a speeding taxi

— a ninety-year-old committing suicide by jumping into the river( she killed herself after 12 years of begging and after she remembered that she had some dignity left in her: to make the choice not to beg— this is not printed, unless the reporter is running short of cooked up ideas and advertorials and decides to do a tearjerker, a human-interest story)

—the rotting corpse of a 75-year-old man recovered from a flat( he lived alone after his wife died two years back, no one knew he had died because of his love for his wife....the neighbours got concerned only because of the smell)

—a severed decomposed leg fished out of a canal ( no one knows about the owner, who is dead as well, though his body is yet to be fished out— he was a famous football player in his village, or a musician who played on a stringed instrument yet to have a name, he was a petty criminal or the man on the street who goes to office every day, returns home contended and prays to his gods for a long life until someone decides because of no apparent reasons to hack off his limbs and dump him down the canal— no one cares if the rest of his body is still down there, feeding fishes, breeding larva, and speaking of unrequited love)

— train mows down two( farmers who had come to work as masons in the city's skyscrapping districts, and had to catch the last train back or they would have no boats to reach them to their villages )

This column is filled up late in the night, usually with inputs from the crime reporter, heavy on booze, who talks it over the telephone with police officials who have learnt it over the telephone from their colleagues and juniors who have learnt it over the telephone from petty policemen and who had learnt it over the telephone and could have or couldn't have gone to have a glimpse of the sights they mention... it's a complex process, but in effect, really simple... the person who has the assigning to do on the page, the filling of the fixed slots, solves it all... the space is short... and so is time...

the presses are waiting to devour print and advertisements...

in every city there is a person who does it in the midnight like a machine whirring in endless circles, without thought, reason or emotion... and lacking gallows humour for these people are dead and are meant to be forgotten... grammatical mistakes are avoided here, for the assigner knows no one bothers to read this, except elderly people who have a long afternoon to spend with the newspaper, and do not bother in the newspaper schema of things...

all these are recorded deaths... and there are still unrecorded ones...
who bells the cat? who sets the types? who composes? and who is doing the reading?

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

never thought this up until i read this, is it really so?

buro angla said...

i think it is..
:)

Anonymous said...

And I thought you print journalists were considerate.