What is it with death that fascinates us so much?

Watching a funeral procession from a second-floor balcony, I could make out how it held everyone in thrall as a corpse made its final journey. We do not know who it is. If the person were alive and passed us on the street, we would not even look once. Yet as a corpse, the person turns our heads.

And yet, we shudder to talk of, at times even to think of, our own deaths or those of people near us. Of course, we have been trained since our childhood not to talk of death. If you asked your parents what happened to that uncle whom a bus ran over, you get vague replies that generally tell you that the uncle has gone to a faraway place from which he will not return.

Is it this suppression of our natural curiosity that prompts us to take a second look at a cadaver? And this morbid fascination is fed by grisly pictures of mutilated human bodies on all kinds of media.

Whither humanity, one wants to ask? Instead, one is distracted by the drums of yet another funeral procession.

Cheers.