NO, MUMBAI COPS HAVEN’T BANNED THIS PICTURE

Two farewells unfolded yesterday. One, we had the privilege to witness live; the other, our eyes were shut on by fiat.

But what has not been filmed or photographed or shown still transpires; it has a life of its own. A tear will brook no writ; it will come to fall, even from an eye ordered shut. When the heart comes to twist, it follows no diktat other than its own. Neither will await the arrival of cameras.

It may sound preposterous to propose so in the age of 24/7 television and nano-second newsbreaks triggered by no more than the tip of the human thumb. But most life transpires off television and its ancillary multi-media battalions, unbothered by it, and often unconcerned.

Nobody from among yesterday's mourners at Mumbai's Bada Qabrastan leapt to catch the camera's eye, nobody waved, nobody yelled a slogan, nobody attempted a selfie. It was almost a primordial rite, or a pre-media one, which may be quite the same thing. It was almost too undemonstrative and introverted a tableau to seem a thing of our times - a throng of thousands mid-Mumbai, painfully aware it was "breaking news" but stunningly averse to playing out any part of that antic script.

We may have just seen, or been prevented from seeing, a modern day spectacle played out as non-spectacle, a drama whose actors had signed off the plot. It didn't quite seem to matter to them the theatre proprietors had anyhow brought the curtains down in advance and put out a "no show" notice.

The final journey of Yakub Memon, convicted as terrorist and hanged by the suzerainty of the law, proceeded cloaked in censorship - no film, no photos, not at least until Memon had spent 24 hours interred. The Telegraph front-paged an illustration to tell its reader it was proscribed from illustrating the event.

The irony has just begun to pirouette on the bar imposed yesterday, through official advisories and unofficial caution: fold your cameras, recall your OB vans, be off the ringside of Yakub Memon's cortege.

By that time, Yakub's ghost had already had a hearty laugh at the diktat; it had flown off the casket and signed a virtual-world deal where no rules yet seem to apply. It had given the cordons the slip on that thing conveniently called a mobile, entered cyberspace and gone where Yakub Memon himself had never gone before - everywhere that cared to take cognisance of his presence.

Social media was awash with photographs and footage of the cortege almost before the ban order had come into play. Hand-held devices had been pulled out of pockets and apps put rampantly to use. All that was required thereafter was an airlink, pre-paid, post-paid, whoever cared.

Sentenced as home-body to that most feared and abhorred pandemic of our times - terror - Yakub Memon had gone viral. There was even, in at least one newspaper this morning, a last glimpse of the face of the man, just before his near ones read their prayers and showered him under earth.That image may well have beaten the newspapers, jumping on the Internet's fast-lane and cast itself into www mould, world wide web. Dead men have curious ways of telling tales, curiouser still when they've been warned not to. Especially now that they have the licentious muses of technology to consort with.

Censorship, as finance minister Arun Jaitley eloquently argued back in the days when he still occupied the Opposition benches, is an idea whose time may be gone. Chillingly, Yakub Memon, in the process of being hanged and forbidden from public view thereafter, may have become an idea whose time has not yet lapsed.