Rarest of Rare

The phrase “Rarest of Rare” connects your mind quickly to capital punishment. These days there is lot of halla gullah regarding the sanctity of capital punishment. Every time a capital punishment is announced, some nears and dears and some self proclaimed experts on the topic start surfacing. We start questioning whether we as a society have a right to murder someone, who has not acted as per norms laid down by us. Whether the crime was sufficiently rare enough to qualify for the phrase “rarest of rare” to be applied in a particular case is not well established. In a world of continuously changing definitions nothing can really be called rarest. On the other hand, if we see it with an altogether different perspective everything can be called unique in itself.

Here I would like to quote a story I read quite some time back. A painter wanted to visit a jail to paint the face of the prisoner who was sentenced the capital punishment. He wanted to capture the face expressions of a hard core criminal. With some contacts he could arrange this meeting. When this painter met the prisoner, the prisoner started weeping. Painter could not understand why a hard core criminal is weeping in front of him. Actually the prisoner had identified this painter. He had created a painting of him many years back and that time painter had made a remark that your face is very innocent. This time prisoner was worried if the painter will paint him now he may no more be impressed with his expressions.

Relationship of earlier goodness of a person to the extreme crimes a person commits is a matter of debate. Without going into any debate I just wanted to express my feelings about the system of punishments. I was impressed with a famous story ‘Panchlight’ by a great Hindi writer Phanishwarnath Renu. This is about a man from a village who was punished by his Panchayat for a social boycott. Later he was called back as he was the only person in the village who knew how to burn the petromax lanterns used for marriage functions. A punishment system should be something which can help a person realize his faults and then the person’s abilities and skills can still be used for benefit of the society. I also read a lot about reforms in mental makeup of prisoners when IPS Kiran Bedi was In-charge of the Tihar Jail. So dear readers! I feel if we could also change our punishment systems to match the world of changing definitions.

Dr. Sunil Ji Garg