The brief woeful life of Sachin Pariyar

The child artiste’s tragic death has exposed a society that has traded its soul for profit.

The death of Sachin Pariyar, the celebrity child artiste who was eventually left to beg on the streets of Kathmandu, came as a shock to many. However, if his eventual demise was a final blow on his mortal life and our collective conscience, he had started to become a tragic figure on our smartphone screens months earlier. Mainstream news portals on Thursday churned out quick, tone-deaf obituaries, blaming a congenital trilateral ventricular cyst that had left him paralysed. But his life and death warrant a sociological examination rather than just a neurological diagnosis. After all, as the French philosopher Guy Debord warned us long ago, the society of spectacle supplants individual human relations in capitalist societies. More so in the social media age, where dehumanisation of human relations is often directly proportional to capital accumulation. Sachin succumbed to such an illness that inflicts our society today.