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: French statesman Charles De Gaulle once remarked that “the graveyards are full of indispensable men”. When a human being dies, she will be remembered by someone or the other as an irreplaceable loss. If this person achieved great fame and adulation, the sense of missing her badly is shared by vast multitudes with a general consensus that an era has ended.
The marquee event of the funeral of pop icon Michael Jackson was one such moment of loss, graced by thousands in Los Angeles and watched by many multiples more worldwide. The funeral’s mood of ‘celebration’ of his extraordinary musical achievement was meant to leave a taste in public mind of his best times and compositions, sans the shenanigans.
In all societies, burials and cremations have deep meaning. From ancient times, civilisations have devoted considerable time and energy to designing specific rituals to inter and commemorate the dead. Archaeologists track funerals and pottery as the two most recognisable characteristics of any community from which a great deal can be inferred about cultural values and habits of that group.
A funeral is not only an occasion for nostalgia based on attachment to the deceased but also a social practice that reinforces widely held norms surrounding human existence. The psychological wish of every single person that she should get a ‘decent burial’ is at once a social desire to reproduce and preserve oneself through cycles of death and birth.
Depending on the individual and her category of accomplishment, funerals vary in form and substance. When heads of state or cherished political figures pass away, we have ‘state funerals’ organised by governments and marked by some routines that remind attendees and watchers of the gratitude in which the body politic holds the person who ended her earthly sojourn. Hearse processions with massive crowds, full gun salutes, march- and fly-pasts, valedictory speeches, and emotional scenes of outpouring grief are staples in state funerals.
If the individual being sent off is not only revered by state elites but also by the masses, state funerals turn into unforgettable “I-had-been-there” events. When Mahatma Gandhi received a state funeral in 1948, more than one million people spontaneously gathered near the site of his pyre on the Yamuna river in Delhi and the United Nations ordered its flag flown at half-mast. That funeral was especially hurtful for the people of India owing to guilt...
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