Column

In 1827, lying on his deathbed, Ludwig Beethoven is reported to have told those who had gathered around him, “Applaud friends, the comedy is over.” Had he been around these days to be assaulted by intimate details of Jade Goody’s impending death, the great composer might have been moved to say that the farce has just begun.

Beethoven’s caustic comment on life had nevertheless both pathos and profundity; in a mere six words, he not only acknowledged human limitation but also mocked divinity. The drama being played out by Ms Goody has no less pathos in the existential sense, but little of profound value apart, alas, that nothing need be exempt from opportunism, greed and voyeurism. Even death.

For the past few weeks, Jade’s battle for life has been played out as some sort of a humdinger climax for a Twenty20 match. Anything could happen in the next few hours, we are informed every hour. Millions worldwide, including the Prime Minister of Britain, have been watching and waiting with bated breath, sucked into this drama of a small time celeb who shot to fame because of abrasive behaviour and a vocabulary that boasted six words, two of them four-letter ones.

Look, my heart is not made of granite, and my sympathies for Jade’s medical condition are unreservedly profuse. To be suddenly told at age 27 that you are dying of cervical cancer reveals the divine unfairness that perhaps Beethoven had alluded to in the aforementioned statement. This is a painful, fatal disease that can shatter even the most stoic personality, both physically and psychologically. Moreover, Jade has two small children too, which enhances the grief considerably. The sadness is surely universal.

What is baffling (and admittedly somewhat irksome) is not that an enormous personal tragedy should have been reduced into a soap opera through aggressively PR-driven morbid exhibitionism, but that it should find such ready acceptance.“Watch me die,” Jade seems to say, as if this is some great and unusual spectacle being played out. And people are watching with bated breath.

In some ways, Jade’s need for a ‘public’ demise has had instant and undeniable benefits. In Britain, I learn, there is growing interest in understanding cervical cancer as more women are going in for early tests. There is also a hefty sum of money she has been able to raise for her children through this prolonged reality show, which is a highly laudable motherly act, though many psychologists would argue that the nature of raising this money could leave them scarred in a way that money may never cure.

Debate on the whys and wherefores of Jade’s death drama has been furious and multi-dimensional. Some argue that it reflects the collapse of global capitalism, others that it manifests the inadequacies of the Left, old and new, in Britain. I submit something less weighty, that it also pertains to greed — for money and fame, even in the last moments of one’s life: And of the vicarious desire of human beings to know, pry, be informed/entertained/whatever in an increasingly fishbowl existence.

Issue, of course, is that now that we know so much of Goody’s last days, do we really know what death means?