Death Of The Obit

When former Foreign Secretary and key Indira Gandhi aide T. N. (Tikki) Kaul died in his mountain retreat in Rajgarh in Himachal Pradesh on January 16, The Times (London) carried a half-page obituary on him the very following morning.

The Times, while recalling his personal life and professional career in anecdotal detail, paid fulsome tribute to his role in shaping Indian foreign policy. By contrast, the mainline Indian papers finished off the item in a few terse paragraphs. And most of them got his age wrong.

Getting a fact of life wrong might be seen as discourtesy to the dead. But more to the point here is whether the obituary column, which used to be treated as a kind of sacred space in a newspaper, itself has been placed on the endangered list, amid the changing ambience of the Press in India.

 

Most newspapers have done away with the morgue the term used to describe the advance stock of obituaries in a newspaper office. It used to be constantly updated with considerable attention to detail as if the obit piece itself were a living being.

Rather than going through the tiresome exercise of constantly updating the morgue, newspapers increasingly sought to rely on agencies; and the agencies themselves got used to doing a hasty last-minute job. So, even if there was a factual error, it didn't seem to matter much. Dead men, after all, are not known to issue denials.

Just before he died in December last year, Malcolm Rutherford, the Financial Times' obituaries editor, wrote a piece that ran under the heading: Man is mortal, but obituaries will never die. Despite such intimations of immortality, there seems to be a reasonable chance that obit writing itself at least in these parts might become due for an obit.

Rutherford traced the evolution of newspaper obituaries through The Times in the 19th century, even while its origins go further back. Apart from the fact that The Times obits were supposed to be the last word on a man's life, they carried a stunning degree of credibility.

There is a story of somebody who having read his own obituary in The Times, called up his friend to ask: Have you read The Times this morning? The friend's instant response was: Yes. Where are you calling from?

Rutherford has wondered if there would be a shortage of obit subjects with the passing of most of the officials of the Empire and generals of the World War years.

Something similar could be said about India with most of the leading figures of the freedom struggle years having passed into history or nearing that phase.

Many of their successors who dot the Indian political scene now would appear comic caricatures by comparison. Many of these would be better remembered by a joke or two but for the fact that obits are supposed to be written with solemnity and do not admit scope for colourful copy. The solution, according to Rutherford, is that future obits may have to be more about entrepreneurs and technologists than about those 'guys' engaged in politics of various descriptions.

According to readership surveys in Britain, the obituary column is a feature that attracts a lot of attention as compared to the other pages.

It is pointed out that Letters to the Editor, crossword puzzles and the obit column are among the more reader-friendly parts of a British newspaper. Not just reader-friendly as a wag has remarked but cashier-friendly as well: letters come free, obituaries cost little and the crosswords are a bargain.