Last week, a paper reported the story of 40 year old Priya Zagade, a receptionist, paralysed from the waist down, whose husband, Pradeep Zagade, a fireman, died in a work accident

At political peace

Last week, a paper reported the story of 40 year old Priya Zagade, a receptionist, paralysed from the waist down, whose husband, Pradeep Zagade, a fireman, died in a work accident. She has refused to deposit her compensation cheque of 16 lakhs -- demanding instead a probe into alleged infrastructural irregularities. She has sought appointments with officials from the BMC and the fire department but they have been busy or unwilling, and haven't met her.

When Ms Zagade talks of her husband, we can see they shared a wonderful, moving love: childhood sweethearts from the same chawl, he built a special ramp for her to negotiate their building steps. Perhaps this sort of love is a kind of great justice -- proof that we matter after all in a world of dispensable numbers, balancing out the hardships of life. And we all know what it is to be bereft and betrayed when this taken from us. Often, when we use the language of justice, it's because we do not provide a public language for the many dimensions of loss -- or human experience. The system does not or cannot recognise the emotional ravaging as an equally fundamental part of the loss, because it seems materially non-compensable.

It's unclear whether there is a genuine functional problem that led to the fireman's death. And surely, by providing compensation, the state has done its job. But the fact that senior department people will not give her an ear, points to a strange, adolescent evasion common in our society.

Somehow there has to be a means to build this kindness into the procedure of compensation, to affirm through the way the system is designed that people do after all, matter. Sometimes love is just a matter of having said you are sorry.

Across the Universe from Priya Zagade and these feudal evasions, an MLA Ravi Rana, is cooking up a New Age mantra for evasion, which can only leave you opening and closing your mouth like a silent film comedian. That's fine with Mr Rana really, as long as you keep your eyes closed meanwhile.

He would like to hold Baba Ramdev's yoga camps in the Assembly. Control your satisfied chortle at the thought of our un-beloved MLAs laid low by ignominious asanas. Mr Rana is not wresting any such innocent justice for us.

His aim: through this spiritual escalation, MLAs will no longer be caught up in petty issues like, um, caste and language.

Now, who are we to tell Mr Rana, who is after all in politics, that caste and language lie at the heart of so many overt and covert injustices in our society? In fact, who are we to tell any of the numerous people who run to Vipassana, Art of Living or just the nearest Feng Shui Frog and Serene Scent Candle shop, without also addressing one bit the political texture of their lives? How does it matter if our lives are part of the grand design of consumerism, ignorance, injustice or whatever else we do that doesn't help the caste and language problem go away as long as we feel one with the cosmos?

One of the most remarkable things in Tezuka's manga of Buddha's life, is that the Buddha is never beatific for long. He suffers till the end, his compassion making it impossible to evade the injustice of the world. At no point does his spirituality disconnect him from the materiality of life around. Sometimes justice, like love, means shrugging off these facile divisions and evasions, looking the truth in the eye and recognising it in all its complexity.

Paromita Vohra is an award-winning Mumbai-based filmmaker, writer, teacher and curator working with fiction and non-fiction. She runs Devi Pictures production company. Reach her at https://www.parodevi.com/