Call it a morbid fascination, but for many years before forbidding paywalls that required me to pay in expensive pounds put paid to the habit, I was a regular reader of obituaries in The Economist. I liked the succinctness of the essays and the restrained quality of their summaries.
There was, of course, the matter of the discomfort that I had with the journal’s politics. For long, I felt that it was a little too right-leaning and seemed to take a position that implied overtly or covertly that the market was the great leveller, without sufficiently pausing to reflect on the market’s many loopholes that allowed for capitalism to run amok. This was at odds with my own position about the market and my limited faith in its workings.
In recent years, the journal has stated that it is in the ‘radical centre’. I have my doubts. But that does not matter. When opportunity permits i.e. when there is no paywall, I do dip into the journal’s obituaries. My disagreement with the journal’s position has not entirely put me off the journal. At least not its obituaries anyway.
This came to mind when I read a number of obituaries of Ram Vilas Paswan. All obituaries were characterised by a numbing sameness. ‘Dalit leader’ ‘weather-vane’ (mausam vaigyanik or weather scientist was the preferred adjective with all its attendant negative implications—a back-handed compliment this was) and ‘world record’ were the phrases that dominated the write-ups, that were, to be charitable, perhaps hastily done.
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