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A sign o’ the times?

12 December 2008

In a theft in Phuentsholing this week, a teenager from a well-to-do family snatched a bag off a woman but was chased and stopped by a monk. From a news point of view, it was an unusual case of human interest value.

Unusual as it may have been, the incident brought to surface a number of disturbingly real implications.

First, the boy claimed to have been threatened with death by goons across the border. We could assume that the boy was concocting an excuse. We could be wrong. Lest we forget, a Bhutanese youth was beaten to death in Jaigaon in November, 2007, and it took his family more than a week to trace and recover what remained of his body for a proper funeral.

Nearly every day seems to bring news of a youth suicide or homicide. Yet in a society growing numb to violence, such killings attract little public notice unless they reach new heights of senselessness, tragedy, or shock. Or unless they happen in our backyard. How long before we see something like the Columbine High School shootout in Littleton, Colarado, in April, 1999?

Also, the boy owed the money reportedly because of a drug habit. Abuse of drugs may be old news now but it continues to infect and spread, more now than ever before. What does it show of a society when people reflexively suspect a drug overdose angle to every death of a Bhutanese youth here or abroad? Are we becoming apathetic to each other?

We have always associated petty theft in the border towns with Indian criminals. That it was a Bhutanese boy who committed the crime in this case, in full view of other Bhutanese in the area who were familiar with him, is disconcerting. It suggests that, perhaps, we are becoming increasing disconnected from each other, apathetic. Like countless modern urban populaces around the world, we are living impersonal lives.

Finally, not to trivialise or poetise the incident but, on a symbolic level, it suggested that all hope should not be lost. At this crime scene, a man of the cloth, prevailed in the end. A monk resolved the problem at hand. What, pray, might that imply?

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