It has been a full year since the Air India disaster tore families apart, and what have the victims received? Not closure, but a bureaucratic shrug. The identification of remains remains incomplete, a slow motion tragedy that would have scandalised the Victorians.
They understood the dignity of the dead, even in the age of steam and empire. Now we have DNA sequencing and an airline's liability lawyers, but the families wait while the corporate machinery grinds on. This is not a failure of technology.
It is a failure of will. We have become a civilisation that values process over people, and the air crash families are the collateral damage. The honourable path would have been to treat each fragment of bone as sacred, each soul as a story that must be told.
Instead we get delay, obfuscation, and the quiet erosion of hope. History will judge us harshly. The Romans at least knew that the dead deserved a proper pyre.
We offer only forms in triplicate.
