| ashu |
Posted
on 07-Feb-02 01:29 AM
Hi all,
About two weeks ago, a former Nepali bureaucrat slash well-respectd
economist (one prominent person) died in Kathmandu.
Today's Kantipur and Kathmandu Post are awash with so many condolence
ads (ads -- out of which Kantipur makes a lot of money) that one
begins to wonder:
a) Could those putting out these expensive condolence ads NOT find any other creative and respectful way to commemorate the dead?
I mean, surely, instead of having lakhs of rupees variously going to the coffers of Kantipur Publications through such ads, the friends and family of the deceased could have hired a writer to write and publish a "proper" obituary (a la what The Economist magazine carries every week). As it stands, these condolence ads read like contemporary, if amusingly complicated, family tree and NOTHING MORE. (Aside: I get a kick out of reading the granddaughters' names in such ads -- you know, Pinky, Rinky, Sweety and so on!)
b) Or, perhaps Pratyoush Onta's this article may make uis think once again about this whole condolence ad business.
Finally, and I can't resist this (especially since the deceased was an economist): how would an economist begin to analyse this condolence ad ko industry and suggest incentives to modify these commercially crass (and enriching only Kantipur and telling us nothing insightful about the deceased) behaviours on the part of those who mourn?
oohi
ashu
ktm,nepal
***************************************************
Published in The Kathmandu Post, 17 Sept 1999
The Politics of Knowledge
Condoling Creatively
Pratyoush Onta
In recent days, we have seen a flood of condolences published in various newspapers (including this one) remembering those who perished in the aircraft accident about two weeks ago. Published with some photographs and texts, these condolences have come from friends, business colleagues and relatives of those who were killed.
While this practice seems to assume flood-like proportions after such accidents, we have now gotten used to seeing what seem like public celebration of those who have departed from this earth and sympathy for the bereaved in a regular basis. So much so that some months ago, pointing at a photograph published in a daily, a 70-year old relative of mine who cannot read asked me, "Who has died?" When I looked at it, it turned out that it was a message of congratulations rather than condolence!
That encounter had suggested to me that something was amiss here. How do we interpret the increase in the practice of such public expressions of sympathy in the print media in recent years? What does this practice indicate in terms of changes that our society is undergoing? And more importantly, are their more innovative ways of expressing one's condolences?
In search for answers to the above questions, I brought this issue up with critic C K Lal during our weekly radio show on Monday of this week. Lal says that the publishing of condolences in our print media is an evidence of what he calls the "commercialization of emotions."
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