Memorial for Manmohan is a Requiem for a Lost Dream

Dead people never really die. They are kept alive through man's endless need for ritual, both in the private and public realm.

- Ravi Shankar

Dead people never really die. They are kept alive through man's endless need for ritual, both in the private and public realm. The tasteless, thankless and time-serving twaddle dissing the late Prime Minister Manmohan Singh in the days following his death reveals how low netas can stoop to get eyeballs. Union ministers tweeted uncouth deprecations of the legacy of a man who changed the country for the better, whatever his politics, or the lack of it, may have been. Congress calamitarians yelled disgrace and demanded a memorial for Dr Singh: a man they held in contempt for being too 'academic', too 'non-aggressive', too 'non-political'. In Indian culture, or in most cultures, speaking ill of the dead is considered unseemly. The absence of culture in public figures was painfully manifested in public everywhere last week, perhaps, as a perverse acknowledgement of an accidental prime minister who unassumingly moulded a new India.