We have become a civilisation of inventory. Of spreadsheets. Of DNA swabs and digital records. The Air India crash families, now battling to identify the remains of their loved ones, are the latest victims of our collective failure to treat death with the gravity it once commanded. UK forensic experts have offered assistance. A noble gesture, no doubt. But what does it say about the state of India’s own forensic capabilities? Or indeed, about the globalised machine of disaster management where sovereignty dissolves into a chartered plane of technicians?
Let us step back. The Victorian era, for all its faults, understood the importance of ritual. The body was a temple. The process of identification was sacred. Today, we have automated everything except the raw human agony. The families are forced to wait, to hope, to despair. They sift through photographs, dental records, scraps of fabric. This is not a sign of progress. It is a sign of intellectual decadence.
We have outsourced our grief. We have outsourced our justice. And in doing so, we have lost something fundamental: the ability to face tragedy directly, without the mediation of experts, forms, and red tape. The UK experts are welcome to help, but let us not pretend this is charity. It is a symptom of a world where nothing is local anymore, where even sorrow must be processed through international protocols.
The Fall of Rome was not a single event. It was a thousand small surrenders. Each time we hand over a piece of our autonomy to a faraway specialist, we fall a little more. The families of Air India crash victims deserve closure. But they also deserve a system that doesn't require a transatlantic flight of forensic scientists to give it to them. We must ask ourselves: have we built a civilisation that is efficient but hollow? Or one that is humane?
This is not to disparage the UK offer. It is to ask why we are in a position where such an offer is needed. The answer is uncomfortable. It lies in our obsession with speed, with cost-cutting, with the commodification of everything, including death. We have traded substance for convenience. And now we are paying the price.
Let this tragedy be a lesson. We must reclaim our rituals. We must rebuild our capacities. We must stop pretending that globalisation is a panacea. The bodies of the dead deserve more than a barcode. They deserve a society that can mourn them properly, without needing to call in foreign aid to identify who they were.
