It is a curious thing, this modern refusal to look up. ‘We don’t look at the sky any more,’ whispers a survivor of the recent Air India catastrophe, a phrase that ought to chill the blood of any civilised society. For what is a nation that no longer gazes heavenward but a people resigned to the mud? The crash itself was tragedy enough: twisted metal, lost lives, the primal scream of impact. Yet the aftermath reveals a rot far deeper than any mechanical failure. These survivors, these souls who cheated death, now find themselves trapped not in wreckage but in paperwork. Bureaucratic limbo. A purgatory of forms and delays, of phone numbers that ring into eternity. One imagines the Roman Empire in its terminal decadence: the bureaucracy swollen, the aqueducts crumbling, the citizens wandering amid ruins while officials argued over precedents. Here, too, we see the same pattern. Air India, once the jewel of Indian aviation, has become a symbol of administrative decay. The survivors wait for compensation, for medical care, for the simple dignity of being acknowledged. But the system grinds slowly, as systems do when they have forgotten their purpose. The victims, meanwhile, are left to ponder the irony: they survived the fall from the sky only to be buried in the earth of red tape.
This is not merely a failure of one airline. It is a symptom of a broader intellectual and moral decadence. We have lost the capacity to see the grand arc of history, to understand that a nation’s strength is measured not by its GDP but by its treatment of the vulnerable. The Victorian era, for all its faults, understood duty. The Empire may have been brutal, but it had a sense of obligation. A man who survived a shipwreck would not be left to rot in a customs office. There was a public conscience, a shared belief that the state existed to serve. Today, we have replaced duty with process. We have substituted compassion for compliance. The survivors are not people; they are case numbers. Their stories are not tragic; they are data points. And we, the public, are complicit. We scroll past the headlines, muttering ‘how awful,’ before returning to our trivialities. We have forgotten that the sky is a mirror, and that to ignore the heavens is to ignore our own humanity.
Arthur Penhaligon, signing off with the lament that we no longer look up, but perhaps we never really did. We merely pretended, until the pretence became too heavy to bear.
