Colours of indifference

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There is an unfairness to news we must recognize. A murder in Coimbatore, no matter how dramatic, loses in intensity to a bomb blast in Mumbai. The second is more dramatic, more collective and more historical than the story of a 26-year-old painter called Santosh, murdered in broad daylight. What marked him for history was not the murder which could conscript a few inches of newspaper space but the fact that it was caught on film. It became a spectacle. A spectacle demands attention and analysis, while a silent crime would have faded easily.

What horrified people who watched the film was not the crime, but the indifference; the silence of those who watched. The murder of Santosh was brutal and blatant. A man cycling quietly is brought down and bashed to death by three assailants, all of whom allegedly belong to a criminal gang. Santosh slumps and the assailants walk away with a contentment and an arrogance that power over another being and his body brings.

Every bit of their cinematic act was caught on CCTV film. The age of scrutiny contributes its own vignettes to the visual sociology of our time. Once an event is caught on film, it is subject to the power of replay. Every move becomes an act of caricature in the ritual of replay. Cinema creates its own sense of vivisection as every scene is ruthlessly dissected. Often, redundancy becomes only the objectivity of repetition and replication.

More than the crime, a "standard" drama of urban life, what horrified people was the reaction of spectators. If the murder was high drama, the spectators were still life. The question everyone asked was why it was that no one protested, objected or intervened. In the ensuing analysis, the murder of Santosh becomes a pretext to a new context - the silence of urban spectators. For a sociologist mired in archives and precedents, the incident invokes the classic reports of Kitty Genovese.

Kitty Genovese was a young woman walking late evening in a street in New York. A young man, her assailant stalks her and stabs her numerous times. Kitty screams, the lights of the flats all around come alive and people watch. The murderer realizes no one is going to rescue her, returns and stabs Ms Genovese to death.

The Genovese murder was high scandal. A sociologist decided to investigate why people did not respond to her appeals for help. One of the staple answers his investigators got was that people felt they were watching TV. They get immobilized by that feeling. In an age where even TV is interactive, the immobility of people before a brutal act of violence mystifies even more. The first hypothesis seems to suggest that spectatorship increases curiosity while deadening the conscience.

There is a second explanation to such events offered by the psychologist Robert Lifton. Lifton talks of "psychic numbing". It is an act of desensitization or banalization created by the requirements of professional expertise. The language of expertise is the language of distancing. An expert's insight is a function of distance.

The question one asks is does the urban milieu create such psychological distance, where people watch but never reach out, look but never want to touch? We often respond to beggars and hawkers harassing us at traffic signals. Instead of engaging with them, we raise the window of distance or separation with the outside. It is a form of numbing, limiting our sense of engagement with the outside or we engage with it as if we are watching ourself at a distance. The drama of alienation is complete.

There is a third possibility which is endemic to the nature of urbanism. The speed, the pressure of the city demands a neutrality, an indifference be built into our attitudes. You related to the other in fragments or parts. The normalcy of city life demanded a sense of distance, not quite numbing but an outside skin of indifference. You watched but you did not relate. The urban man was a spectator, a voyeur, a flaneur with a restless eye but not a witness. A spectator only consumed what he say while a victim was more involved, he testified, owned up and engaged with what he saw.

Three options. Three stories. Three fables to explain the sense of what happened. Santosh died too quickly to sense the indifference around him. But we, who watch that film replay his brutal end again and again searching for some body movement, some face reacting with care and concern. Santosh, the painter died twice. First through murder, second through indifference. The second death implicates a wider circle of guilt. It involves all of us wondering what if a few had protested. The accompanying silence provides the answer.

Shiv Visvanathan is a social scientist.