Let them rest in peace

“Kitna hai bud-naseeb Zafar, dafna ke liye

  Do gaz zameen bhi na mili koo-e-yaar mein”

(How unfortunate is Zafar to not able to get even 2 yards of land in his homeland for burial).

The last Mughal King may have written the couplet in some other context but the situation, as of today, depicts a very grim picture of land scarcity for burial.

As per World O Meter (world statistics updated in real time), 75000 deaths on an average occur every day and culminate in a figure of 70 lakhs in a year. The ever rising human population is already eating in to the living space resulting in land getting expensive and scarce. Obviously therefore, the space for cremation is shrinking day by day.

The scene at the graveyard is always gloomy and pathetic. It is a resting place for those who have departed from this world. The man from primitive times always lived in fear as the life and death were considered the acts of spirit. In order to appease such spirits, he devised various religious ceremonies to do away with the dead bodies. The burial is a custom that arose for the reason and is perhaps the most widespread religious practice to dispose off the dead. This is in practice for centuries immemorial.

As the rituals of disposal get over, the kith and kin of the deceased mark the area, put up a tomb and carve an obituary on the tombstone in memory of the dead. Once each year, the family members visit the place, offer flowers and pray in remembrance to the departed.

Many communities in India are finding it difficult to get a resting place for their near and dear ones who leave for their heavenly abode. The problem in big metros is so severe that some unique solutions have been in practice such as exhuming the bodies after a certain period of say 2 years and placing such remains in the walkways around the cemetery. Another alternative to overcome the situation is to recycle the grave which however does not go well with the relatives of the dead as it grievously hurts their sentiments.

The recycling is however being done time and again else there would not be a place left to accommodate the rush of freshly deceased. The sentiments of the people notwithstanding, the overcrowding crisis in cemeteries has necessitated the recycling of graves i.e. human remains to be dug up and put in to a deeper space to make way for the new burials.

Each grave has some story to share. All of us desire to be remembered even after death. The last resting place therefore deserves to be kept intact without an onslaught of a bulldozer.    

 

It is an ever progressing modern world and the progress is never without its handicaps. We are facing enormous challenges; challenges of violence, challenges of the economy, challenges of the mind and the body and so on. While the challenge to accommodate the living is on, we are researching to discover if life is there in the Moon or the Mars. In this entire melee, even the dead are competing with the living for space to rest. A new system of belief sounds a bit funny but true to the prevailing situation. ‘Let those who had a rest so long give space to those who have just fallen asleep’.

Even the dead can’t rest. Weird, isn’t it?