Maqsood

There is something really upsetting about the Delhi Zoo incident.
Besides the obvious of course. I am not a fan of the human species, I choose animals any day. But the Delhi Zoo incident opened my eyes to the desensitized beings our generation has evolved or rather regressed into. Today we can watch a man plead for his life and then die and react by sharing it with a click of an emotionless button. I am guilty of watching it, too. But what I am not guilty of are nasty, inhuman comments. He deserved it. F*cking retard. Drunk fool. Poor tiger is not to blame. The only comment I agree with is the last but then a man did die, a horrific, sad death.
As I watched the nasty remarks flow in, I wondered if we would have reacted the same way if it wasn’t Maqsood but some rich kid from Delhi? Would we have just called him retarded or stoned and simply passed on the video? Don’t we all do stupid things and have friends who have done stupid things? Do we wish death on them?

We have heard many versions of this story. Some state that he was drunk, some state that he jumped in, some claim that he threw stones at the tiger, lost his balance and fell. We probably will never know the truth. But if we can watch how his life came to an end, perhaps we can shed a little light on his life itself.

His name was Maqsood and had a very short attention span. He used his phone to listen to music because he never had any money to top it up. He had a wife and a child on the way. His parents were separated. He lost recently lost his job and was obsessed with tigers and even had photographs of them on his phone. He would visit the zoo frequently since he lost his job and then narrate stories about the tigers to his friends. He was 22 years old.

So as we sit on our cushioned behinds and comment on a death of a silly man and ‘like’ a picture of a couple honeymooning in Italy in the same breath, parents have lost a son. A wife has lost a husband. Her unborn child, a father.

And we watched, made jokes, and called him an asshole.