Killing him is killing the future we owe our children

The last few nights, I could barely sleep. A deep sense of fear and anxiety was sitting on my chest. My breaths were shallow, and I was feeling suffocated. As a claustrophobe, the last time I had similar bouts of anxiety attacks was when Prince was found deep inside the borewell, and a football team of young boys got trapped inside a flooded cave in Thailand, and rescue attempts were being made from outside. Every minute was like an hour.

Helplessly watching someone slide to death requires insensitivity of the worst kind.

How are they keeping calm, waiting without knowing if any attempts to rescue them at all are being made? Will they remain alive till help reaches them? These questions kept haunting me.

I knew what was causing the anxiety yesterday. Sonam Wangchuk was on indefinite fast at Jantar Mantar seeking the resignation of the central education minister. The resignation was a symbol; what he was asking for was performance from the government and accountability from the people who are at the helm of affairs.

His health was deteriorating fast, almost taking him dangerously to the point of no return, and the government was playing deaf to his demands. While the majority remained blissfully oblivious to the current state of affairs, a few by the name of cockroaches dared to fight in their quixotic bid to redefine the education landscape. Sonam chose to make a common cause and stood with them.

But what was disheartening was the jeering of a small section of people, for whose interests he was fighting. They were not only seen hurling abuses but were seen mocking and questioning his credentials as a citizen and the ones who were supporting this protest.

Yesterday morning on the TV, we saw policemen swarming the protest venue and forcefully lifting him to the hospital to prevent him from dying. Not because the government loved him, but they didn’t want to gift him martyrdom, which might fuel an uprising. The uprising to make an elected government accountable. Seeing someone die, while knowing you can prevent it.......it takes apathy of a different level.

Some solace. We are not losing him. He will live to fight another day for our people, our country.

This morning, almost half asleep, I remembered his speech and could reproduce it verbatim. In today's world, when our heads of state give speeches that make you cringe and run to close your ears, his speech was absolutely old-school—coming from a role model and an example for society. People of that calibre led us then.

That was the 27th April 2024, the Convocation of the Undergraduates of XIM University. Sonam Wangchuk was the Chief Guest, and I was there as one of the guest faculty members in the audience. Seeing your students walk away with the degrees they have earned into the life ahead is a joyous occasion.

Another attraction was Sonam Wangchuk, whom I had heard of but had never seen him in person.

His exterior of a small, smiling, shy, quiet, and polite person with a glint in his eyes barely hid the cold determination of a fighter. His reputation had preceded him. He was with his wife, Gitanjali J Angmo who is an Odia from Balasore and also an alumna of the university.

His message to the graduating students was unambiguous. That students are not given education to serve as a slave for someone's unethical interest but are designed as potential change-makers – the solvers of problems of their own, of their organisation’s, and that of society. And he gave the mantra of how to be a change-maker. A great takeaway that has remained etched in me even after almost two years. I let my imagination travel back in time.

This was the summary of his speech, which I recollect clearly.

Curiosity:

Stay curious. Try to know how things around you operate – from nature to people. Doubt the established dogma; know the rationale behind the established things. See who the ones are benefiting from it and who are resisting change and want the status quo to continue. Only when you understand how it works can you solve the problems.

Empathy:

Develop empathy. Try to put yourself in the position of the disadvantaged and weak and see things from their perspectives. In a democracy, their voices have to be heard and factored into all the development initiatives. The small and big all have their right over this planet. The brute majority should not be only for the majoritarian agenda. This place belongs to all.

Spirit of Initiative:

Be the first one to stick your neck out and risk being seen standing alone. Not many will like it, but a beginning has to be made. Voice it, transmit it. Be heard. Others will join.

Action:

Being sympathetic alone is not enough. It can only make you a couch warrior. You need to participate. You need to take the initiative to set examples by doing it yourself and by mobilising people to join your initiative. Change happens when more people join.

Experience:

Nothing teaches you more than your own experience. Others' experience might give you perspectives and insights to avoid their mistakes, but your own experience still is the best teacher. Never avoid being a part of some different experience. Don’t be afraid to fail.

Confidence:

Earn confidence. Confidence comes from you being right. Also, with your knowledge, experience, and deep understanding of how individuals and systems work, you can see how loopholes in the systems have developed and how that can be plugged.

Success:

Success should be seen differently. It should not be seen in terms of power, position, or material success. That’s a faulty social construct. You should see your success in terms of the positive impact you are creating around you. Apart from your own safety, security, and growth, you need to be a person who speaks for the weak and disadvantaged and has the least negative impact on our environment.

This was not a message only to the students; it was a message to the parents too. To us.

Are we raising change-makers, or are we raising prized oxen and draft horses — strong, obedient, and useful to someone else?

And to the people out to burn him at the stake; are you listening? Because killing him is not just killing one man to save your interest. It’s killing the future we owe our children.

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PPF: Pay for Public Failures

In line with the much-publicised NEP 2020, Odisha’s schoolchildren are getting a world-class education in one subject the syllabus forgot to list: Creative Fact-Checking. With thousands of mistakes across textbooks, we’ve accidentally launched India’s largest critical thinking experiment.

Who needs Olympiads when every math sum is a puzzle and every history date is a plot twist? Students get a shot of Nimbuda Nimbuda when the numbers get boring, just to keep the experiment joyous. Sarcasm aside, it has left the state embarrassed and the country stunned.

Double engine or Trouble engine?

Everyone’s trying to understand how low we had to sink to produce textbooks of such quality. It feels surreal. The incoherence reads like a Class 5 summer project done on a computer with no adult supervision. The government’s talent for engineering trouble has now turned inward — autophagy, you could call it. 

Is this an isolated case of gross neglect bordering on willful apathy, or just our local tradition? 

Try this: Name one government project, delivered by department staff, that’s actually high quality. Exclude VVIP pet projects with unlimited budgets or contractor-led showpieces. Or name one government service you can access without hitting a dozen barriers. You won’t need to look far.

Just look at a typical middle-class home. Dirty water? Buy a filter. No electricity? Buy an inverter/ generator. Polluted air? Buy an air purifier. No cooking gas? Buy an induction cooktop. Bad school? Go private or pay for tuition.

These were the services our taxes were supposed to cover. The State was supposed to deliver them. It doesn’t. It won’t. And we’ve accepted that as normal.

We slap a band-aid on systemic failure and call it a solution.

We’re probably the only people in the world who quietly pay for every government failure from our own pockets. Worse, we compete to buy the more premium version than the neighbour. We install booster pumps, drill illegal borewells, and set up private transformers — all to grab a bigger share of what should’ve been public.

The Indian middle class is the world’s largest municipal corporation.

We supply our own water, power, clean air, and education. The government just collects the subscription fee. Then it unabashedly calls the whole thing a “growing consumer economy” and taxes every RO, inverter, and purifier.

These aren’t signs of growth. They’re evidence of failure. And the State owes us answers.

India’s middle class has seceded from the Indian State. Not through protest or rebellion, but by quietly buying its way out of state failure.

That’s Shankkar Aiyar’s argument in Gated Republic (2020).

The State fails at basics — providing water, power, education, health, air, policing, and justice. Instead of fixing the system, the middle class builds a private replica. Install ROs because tap water is filthy. Buy inverters because the grid can’t cope. Pay school fees because government schools don’t teach. Hire security because the cops don’t show up. Each private fix is a “gate.” Stack them together and you get a Gated Republic — a country within a country.

You pay taxes to the State, then pay again to private providers just to live.

We don’t protest. We aspire. Then we just purchase.

The modern gated community is the logical endpoint. Why do we build them? Because they deliver what every city should - open spaces, parks, community halls, pools, libraries, recreation centres, safety, discipline, order.

We’ve privatised the very idea of a neighbourhood.

In the last few decades, we’ve fixed our offices. We’ve nearly fixed our homes. Even airports and railway stations are getting better through private partnerships. What still hurts is the space between them. Step outside your gate and you’re hit by chaos — badly designed roads, random speed breakers in every shape, potholes that qualify as modern art, unregulated traffic, unplanned sprawl. A road that’s “four-lane” on paper barely fits two cars. You’re seen dodging concave potholes and convex manholes, while both sides are choked by parked vehicles because some popular food joint runs out of a residential plot.

Whose job is it to keep public space in order? Public or private? We privatize public failures. We budget for the State’s gaps. Why?

Because protest is expensive and buying a solution is faster than fixing the system. Fighting the system takes leadership, time, energy, and the risk of retaliation by the state. We don’t have a culture of fighting for collective interest. We’d rather bribe the clerk to get our file moving than ask why the system is jammed. Individual optimization beats collective action every time. If my kid needs clean water today, a ₹15,000 RO beats a 15-year water supply reform. Taking the wrong side of the road feels fine if it helps you skip a traffic snarl. We’ve even legitimised bribing the pandas at Jagannath Temple for priority darshan. Culturally, we’re obedient. Questioning authority is frowned upon. The older generation still carries the memory of scarcity and oppression. For them, “at least we can buy it now” feels like progress. Avoiding confrontation became a survival tool — live today, to fight another day.

This privatisation of survival has two costs.

It depoliticizes failure. If you can buy water, you stop demanding working pipelines. The urgency to fix the system evaporates.  It creates a two-tier nation. The poor stay stuck with the broken State. The rich and middle-class exit into another planet.

As Aiyar argues, this “private welfare state” is expensive and inefficient. The middle class burns income duplicating what taxes should already cover. And because the people with voice and resources opt out, the State never feels pressured to improve. Reform dies.

India’s most successful public-private partnership is between a failing State and a paying citizen. The State fails; you pay. The State fails again; you pay again.

It’s a downward spiral.

The State grows more inefficient and less accountable. Citizens aspiring basic civic dignity build private bubbles and try to keep up with rising costs — often by earning through unfair means. Imagine the future this builds: a State that rewards inefficiency and corruption.

Ignoring public failure and building private solutions may fix the immediate problem; but the public and private cost is far larger in the long run.

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Dated Rituals and our unquestioning acceptance of them:

The past few weeks have been unbearably hectic—marked by shock, grief, and strain. A string of medical emergencies involving a young relative and the death of an elderly family member have left deep emotional, physical, and financial wounds. As if that were not enough, the relentless pressure to observe age-old rituals became the final straw.

I write this in a daze, overwhelmed by the hundred instructions handed down by a dozen self-appointed experts. Some prescriptions are laughably absurd, yet the zeal with which kin and neighbors enforce them drains your will to resist. In a country that has failed to teach basic civic sense, it's surprising to see that these rituals are followed unquestioningly, without adaptation or change.

A generous definition of a conservative is someone who wants to preserve the good things of the past, and a liberal is someone who wants to discard the bad things based on scientific evidence and social relevance and retain the good ones. But the general perception created by the extreme elements in both groups is that a conservative is the one who wants to cling to everything of the past, and a liberal is the one who wants to destroy everything of the past. Torn between these two extreme views, we see families prefer the appearance of compliance over being labelled ‘liberal,’ simply because obedience has become the safer social currency.

Even so, my reasoning mind asks: What are these rituals? Why were they established? How have they evolved? And why have they endured?

By definition, a social ritual is a repeated, structured set of actions performed by individuals or groups according to established rules, carrying symbolic meaning within a community. 

Rituals reinforce group identity, mark transitions such as birth, marriage, and death, coordinate social life, express values and beliefs, and reduce uncertainty. Their features include repetition, prescribed sequence, recognised roles, symbolic elements (objects, words, gestures), and a shared understanding. Rituals permeate daily life—greetings, religious rites, civic ceremonies like graduations and inaugurations, manners and etiquette, and rites of passage such as weddings and funerals—each bearing the imprint of a community’s culture.

Funeral rituals, specifically, serve overlapping practical, psychological, social, and symbolic functions. 

They structure grief, enabling mourners to express sorrow, find closure, and begin recovery. They honour the deceased, affirm identity and social role, and bring family and community together for mutual support. Rituals mark the transition from life to whatever afterlife or memorial status a culture recognises, enact beliefs about death and continuity, and reassure the living about moral order. Practically, they ensure hygienic handling and disposal of the body, reduce infection risk, and manage material affairs like inheritance and burial sites. They also signal roles and obligations, transmit traditions, and reinforce norms; functions that foster cooperation and social stability, which anthropologists argue helped such practices persist across cultures.

Consider the funeral rituals practised in coastal Odisha over the roughly ten days following a death. 

At close inspection, these rites aim to ensure the timely and respectful disposal of remains in the presence of the community, safeguard family and public hygiene, and provide a structured path for mourning and eventual return to normal life. Extended family, clan, and community supply the physical, emotional, and financial support needed during this crisis.

Let's guess how these rituals would have evolved.

Knowledge in any society arises from observation and experience. People cannot be expected to perform scientific tests for every action, so when wise individuals observed reliable cause-and-effect patterns, they taught others to follow them for safety and benefit. Over time, such practices became social norms and rituals, formed with the community’s well-being in mind and shaped by geography, climate, endemic diseases, economic conditions, and the average person’s knowledge and emotional capacity at the time. 

Many such practices became part of regional religious customs and gained strong social protection. So entrenched are they that people follow them without reassessing their relevance. This rigidity invites abuse: the uneducated, socially marginalised, and economically poor not only suffer the loss of a loved one but also shoulder costly rituals that can shatter their finances.

Rituals vary by culture and are heavily influenced by climate and local diseases. We see clear differences across geographies and seasons, and subtle variations within regions; evidence that people and their customs change over time.

We have witnessed rapid change in the last four or five decades: advances in infrastructure, information technology, and telecommunications that created new opportunities, enabled social and economic mobility, and reduced regional imbalances. Remote villages now have roads, electricity, and running water—amenities once found only in cities. If we can adapt so quickly to technological and structural change, why do we not apply the same flexibility to inherited rituals and make them time and place-appropriate? It's often seen that individually, we may question and adapt, but collectively, we often surrender critical thought and choose compliance in the name of safety.

Many rituals, long woven into regional and religious life, persist unquestioned despite changing contexts. Their rigidity often burdens the most vulnerable—those who are uneducated, marginalised, or poor—who must bear not only grief but also costly, archaic practices that can devastate their finances. 

The time to review these ridiculous rituals has come, and individuals and powerful voices in society should bring about these reforms not only by talking about them but by practising them and setting examples for others to follow.

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