Should we never speak ill of the dead?

Public reckoning after the death of a popular but controversial figure can reveal the limits of our moral imagination

- Somak Ghoshal

Whether legacy lies in art or in identity remains a question.

(ISTOCKPHOTO)

In the last few weeks, the deaths of two notable public figures—one a marketing maven who gave India some of its most memorable advertisements, and the other, an actor who was widely loved for his comic roles—have inspired a flurry of conversations on social media platforms.

As is typical of such exchanges on the internet, the opinions have been divisive, each side going for the jugular, painting the legacies left behind by these men in stark black and white terms.

The bodies of work left behind by ad guru Piyush Pandey and actor Satish Shah speak volubly of their unique gifts without a doubt. But their afterlives have been sullied, at least for a section of their admirers, for the political line they had toed. Of the two, Pandey was perhaps the less culpable. As a professional whose job was to make his clients successful, irrespective of the ideologies they stood for, he didn’t let scruples get in the way of achieving business goals. In contrast to Pandey, Shah wore his biases brazenly on his sleeves. His views didn’t seem to be framed by any overt professional agenda. He was his prejudices.