Dengue Debacle

Our media has been so obsessed with scams and corruption that it has not had space and time for the Dengue epidemic raging across the country. And in a country of 1.2 billion, numbers of those affected or dead have ceased to shock us any more.

The travesty of the Dengue epidemic, in Shakespearean parlance, could go well in the way “When beggars die there are no comets seen; the heavens themselves blaze forth the death of princes”. Let us therefore not count the number of the incognito dead but focus on a few precious lives that fatal mosquito bites have claimed.

When the nation of movie lovers had just celebrated the 80th birthday of one its best loved romantic movie-makers, Yash Chopra, and started marveling at his good health at this vintage, the Aedes mosquito struck stealthily with its fatal sting. And as is typical of Bollywood, our media and us Indians, while we went into hysterical reminiscence of the lovely movies that he had made in his lifetime, we chose to overlook the fact that his precious life was lost due to the shoddiness of the municipality which failed to control the breeding of mosquitoes and allowed the epidemic to occur.

Another shocker was the death of Mr RN Trivedi, a senior lawyer of the supreme court, who hailed from Lucknow. I saw his familiar picture staring at me from the pages of the daily newspaper, announcing his demise. I wondered how a man who seemed so reasonably fit the other day could die so suddenly, and speculated if it was a heart attack. I learnt later that he was a victim of Dengue fever.

I remember meeting Mr Trivedi in his River Bank Colony house in the early 90s when he was a lawyer in the Lucknow high court. He then rose to the position of Additional Solicitor General of India, and moved to Delhi. Like many Lucknowphiles, his trips to Lucknow continued with regular periodicity, and we often bumped into each other at the airport and shared our nostalgic memories of this city.

His life was another precious one that Dengue claimed this season.

Dengue fever and deaths should not be given the status of accidents. They are a reflection of the apathy of our municipal services, and our tolerance of this apathy. And as said in the Mahabharat, “While we see people die around us, we refuse to believe that we too shall die”.

If Yash Chopra and RN Trivedi can fall victim to Dengue and die, we too are not beyond mosquito bites, Dengue and death. 

As published in HT City ( Hindustan Times) dated 28th October, 2012.