In an age where the skies have become a crowded highway of commerce and convenience, there is a certain poetry in looking upward. Yet, according to a harrowing new report, the relatives of those who perished in Air India’s latest disaster have been left staring at a void, their grief met with corporate silence. The airline, a once-proud flag carrier now reduced to a bureaucratic husk, has failed to provide basic support or even adequate information to the families. This is not merely a failure of customer service. It is a symptom of a deeper rot, an intellectual and moral decadence that pervades modern institutions.
We are told to trust in systems: safety regulations, black boxes, investigation panels. But when a human life is extinguished, these abstractions do not bring comfort. The Victorian era, for all its hypocrisy, understood the value of public mourning and civic responsibility. The great railway companies of that age, when faced with a crash, would dispatch agents to assist families and issue prompt statements. Today, Air India’s response is a masterclass in evasion. Spokesmen speak in empty platitudes. Compensation is delayed. The dead become statistics.
This indifference is not unique to Air India. It is a mirror of our times. We have outsourced empathy to algorithms and legal teams. The phrase ‘We don’t look at the sky any more’ is not just a quote from a grieving widow. It is an epitaph for an age that has lost its soul. When we stop looking to the heavens, we stop believing in anything greater than ourselves. The result is a civilisation that builds luxury lounges but cannot mourn its dead. British readers, recall the shame of the Herald of Free Enterprise or the Marchioness disaster. In those cases, the state and the companies involved eventually accepted culpability. Today, accountability is a foreign concept.
The real scandal is not that the crash happened. Accidents are inevitable when human beings operate machines. The scandal is that we have normalised this indifference. We have accepted that corporations exist solely to maximise shareholder value, not to serve the living or honour the dead. This is the intellectual decadence I have long warned about. We have traded shared values for quarterly earnings reports. National identity, once bound to institutions like Air India, now means nothing.
It is time for a counter-revolution. A return to duty and honour. The families of the victims deserve more than press releases. They deserve a society that looks up. Until we demand better, we are complicit in this moral bankruptcy. Look at the sky. Remember why we once did.
