Fall, fall, you mortal, so that we can watch

MODERN AMUSEMENTS } It was high noon. He could feel the rising, his scooter riding to the height, the bridge.

His sweat-wet body hit the wind and Sebastian smiled. He could have had a glimpse of the blue sea under the bridge, a sudden glance of it all. Then it could all have whirled, as the scooter took the jolt from the speeding car behind, careless. The screeching moment left the forty-five year old man, who had just seen the sea, in the air. A moment, his beloved back at home, might have halted without a reason she knew. As he fell, down the slope of the bridge, a bus promptly went over. Sebastian lay mauled, mangled, plastered to the hot bitumen road. His flesh, blood, and that last wonder of his, all one with the black-tarred road. His body, or what that remained, now lay under the bus. The driver of the car that hit him sped away.

The vultures were yet to come.

One in strawberry red shirt and blue jeans, one wearing a pale cream shirt, one who’s had his hair ruffled in the wind. These young men were among scores of others who hunched and squatted by the red bus, to see the remains. How does a man look like when ran over by a bus? You don’t get to see this on the telly often. Out they flipped their phone-cameras and clicked away. Some shot it in the video mode. Some watched the screens of cameras that watched the remains of Sebastian.

They bent their backs, stretched their necks, squatted, held in front the mobile cameras for the perfect angle. While Sebastian lay there to be pictured. To be taken away as a fascinating ensemble of pixels, for other voyeurs elsewhere. The mobile clip, an mpeg, could have made an exciting subject to be talked about, shown around among colleagues, neighbours. Thus the man, whose name was Sebastian, who none of us knew before that moment, got pixelated intact, into immortality. Now the sight of his final shape would be spread around through those gadgets, along with songs, games, and porn. Sebastian, after that hot noon, got turned into pure entertainment.

In this same strange land I live, just a day before, a man was seen holding the blood-soaked body of his wife, half-alive, pleading to people around him for help. All promptly watched. Susanna, the woman, died after a while. The couple was less than a mile away from the nearest hospital.

One remembers what Decimus Junius Juvenal wrote about Roman lives of 2nd century BC : duas tantum res anxius optat, panem et circenses. It means: ‘The people (you, me, and those who stood there shooting the dead man from various angles) always long in life for just two things : bread and circuses.

I say, keep at hand a pack of popcorn. You never know when you’d come across someone dying.

[PHOTOGRAPHY : V S Shine Mathrubhumi Daily.]

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