Did we kill him?

The name Gopal Kashyap probably doesn?t mean very much to you. You?re not alone. It didn?t mean anything to anyone who mattered in his home state of Punjab either. Till he was dead.

The name Gopal Kashyap probably doesn’t mean very much to you. You’re not alone. It didn’t mean anything to anyone who mattered in his home state of Punjab either. Till he was dead.

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His was a forgettable face and an ordinary life — and that perhaps was his tragedy. In a sense, his story was the same as that of millions of other Indians who have been orphaned by a booming economy, exiled in their own homes and left straggling behind in the swaggering march to modernity. A common man, in an untold corner of India; a 50-year-old whose closest brush with fame was to head the Rajiv Gandhi Paratha Workers’ Union in Patiala; just your average person with his average problems; irrelevant to politicians, neither depraved nor dramatic enough for the media.

For two years, Gopal Kashyap wrote letters. He lost count of how many — to the district president, to the chief minister, to Sonia Gandhi, to the prime minister. The bus stand, he said, where he had once parked his street cart, was now a gleaming new flyover. The city was beautiful and modern, but he and his workers had nowhere to go. But his remained a story without a storyteller, a play without a stage, a man without a voice or an audience.

The post-mortem said he died from burns. It might be truer to say he died from a different, even more potent, affliction. The anonymity of being an ordinary Indian.

It took suicide to stamp out that anonymity, the end of life to make a poor man rich and an act of desperation to finally make the media notice.

Suddenly, everyone had an opinion on a man we never cared to know.

The media were the murderers, said many of our viewers. I don’t blame them. It was simply abominable that the camera crews, all of them local stringers, freelancing for big channels, had remained behind the lens, content to heartlessly watch a man die, instead of reaching out to save him. Was this ghastly reality television the Indian version of The Truman Show, the brilliant Peter Weir film on how media madness had blurred the lines between fact and fiction?

The cult Nineties film cast Truman Burbank as the star of the most popular television show in the country, a show that has been on air for 10,909 days, using 5,000 cameras to show every moment in the life of one man. The public loves it — there are Truman addicts who go to sleep with the TV on and have sets installed in the bathroom so they don’t miss anything when they’re taking a bath. Except for Truman himself, who is unaware that his life is set in one giant television studio, the rest of humanity watches him go from one staged situation to the next in a telethon of manufactured reality.

Watching the cameras capture Gopal Kashyap’s abrupt transition from life to death, seeing the orange flames swallow him, sent a shudder down my spine. At least vultures prey on the dead. This time, our fraternity hadn’t even waited.

On Day One we wrestled with ourselves, debated the dilemma and eventually decided to censor the pictures sent to us by our stringer in Patiala. But by Day Two, the story had acquired a life of its own. A police inspector had been suspended, tough questions were being asked about why no one had tried to save or stop Gopal Kashyap and the most poignant irony of all, the chief minister was at his house, with the promise of Rs 10 lakh. The contours of the debate had changed, and suddenly they seemed just a little more complex.

Publicity stunt gone wrong, screamed a former police commissioner in our television studio. The compensation package, he said, was ludicrous and would spawn a spate of immolation bids. This was the eve of Republic Day, and we learnt that Delhi police alone had five different reports of people threatening to hurl themselves off roofs, throw themselves in front of charging cars or drench themselves in fuel and fire. But it seemed like too much of a generalisation to me, to club all of these cases into the dismissive category of publicity stunts. We were told that had there been no cameras present in Patiala, no one would have died, because there would have been no gallery available to play to.

I saw great merit in the argument, but found it an incomplete one. Wasn’t it equally true that had Gopal Kashyap not set himself ablaze, he would have continued to be unheard, and unnoticed; a non-entity for the politicians who suddenly descended at his doorstep. Should a country that forces its citizens to the edge of madness accept no blame for their acts of despair?

Wasn’t this really about dichotomous twin truths — the apathy of our political establishment on the one hand and the hyperactive greed of the media on the other, with only their ever-shortening attention spans in common. No wonder then that Gopal Kashyap understood extremity was the only way to be heard in the tone-deaf worlds of both politicians and the press.

But for those who blame it all on the competitive banality of television channels, there is another image from more than a decade ago that they may want to remember.

In the age before television, there was a man called Rajeev Goswami, the poster-boy of the anti-Mandal agitation, immortalised in history by that single moment when he stood at an overcrowded crossing in the capital at the unruly AIIMS intersection, propelling himself to brief iconic status when he lit matchstick to body.

Goswami soon slipped into complete oblivion, and died unnoticed in 2004. The cause he fought for was permanently buried as well by cataclysmic changes in India’s polity and economy. It is no coincidence that the messy traffic intersection that was his performing arena in 1989 is today a swanky set of landscaped flyovers.

New India has new heroes and new causes. But trapped in the quicksand of this breakneck, often directionless, change are the foot soldiers of the new economy: ordinary Indians. And fire becomes their escape from an agonisingly difficult life on Earth.

The writer is Managing Editor, NDTV 24X7