satire : Dead or Alive

 

 

It’s one of the most overused lines by villain in Hindi cinema: “Bring him to me—dead or alive. He’s mine. I’ll kill myself” Sure enough, by the time the movie ends, the person we’ve been mourning for two hours turns out to be the killer himself. Apparently, even dying in our films is optional—one can check out and check back in whenever the script demands.

 

They say movies corrupt children, but honestly, adults have learned far more. Whether it’s robbing a bank or proposing to your crush, there’s always a film reference to guide you. Nowadays people openly admit, “I learned this trick from a crime show.” Well, that explains a lot—because real life now looks like a badly edited sequel to reel life. It’s hard to say who’s copying whom anymore.

 

Every other week we hear a bizarre story from some village or town where a man declared dead on paper turns out to be very much alive and chewing paan outside the tehsil office. More often than not, it’s his own relatives who staged his “death,” usually over land dispute or inheritance dispute. Cine actor Pankaj Tripathi even starred in a film called Kaagaz (Paper) about this exact circus. Take my word for it—coming back from the cremation ground is easier than coming back from the office of the Registrar of the Birth and Deaths, once declared dead in their papers. Once the bureaucratic gods stamp you as “late” resurrecting yourself requires a lifetime of paperwork, petitions, and pillar to post relay race. It’s the only situation where “fighting for your life” is not a metaphor.

 

Someone once told me a story that sounded straight out of a dark comedy. In a mental asylum—sorry, ‘psychiatric facility—there are not just patients who genuinely need help, but also two very special categories. The first includes people dumped there by their families for convenience and never retrieved—perhaps they stood between someone and a portion of pie or land. The second group consists of those who’ve fully recovered, but their families refuse to take them home. The reasons? The same two classics of Indian tragedy: property and paramour. Apparently, both can drive you to madness—and keep you there indefinitely.

 

Since the rise of old-age pensions and government grants, the ‘living dead’ business has truly boomed. There are cases where someone declared alive keeps collecting a dead man’s pension—or someone declared dead is still paying taxes. Some geniuses have even created fictional widows and imaginary dependents. One government scheme offers a job to the widow or child of a deceased official, which naturally led to people discovering new and creative ways to die on paper. In a certain case, the man himself a Govt official goes back to his village, gets a fake death certificate issued by the village headman, and voila his son walks into the office, head shaven in fake mourning, and lands the job. It’s when fine art meets fraud, and the audience is the government.

 

Honestly, only in India can rebirth and resurrection be both a spiritual truth and a bureaucratic loophole. We swear eternal love across seven lifetimes, we believe in reincarnation, and somewhere between the two we’ve turned ‘death’ into a negotiable status. As Ghalib once sighed,

 

“In love there’s no difference

between life and death;

We live only by gazing at

the infidel who kills us.”

 

But today, seeing so much sub-standard poetry being passed on as his, Ghalib might need an affidavit to prove he’s dead and yet to be resurrected.