On the face of it, death is so common, we shouldn’t even look at it twice. 1.8 humans die every second and as a humour website puts it, “death is currently the leading cause of human mortality, a trend that medical science has yet been unable to abate”.

Murder, though, is a slightly different kettle of fish. Killing another human being is one of the few universal taboos observed by all human cultures. But even here there is a gradation. Scores of murders take place every day but beyond the people directly affected, no one really cares.

The Sheena Bora case, though, comes at the intersection of a number of trends. It involves PLUs – people like us. The Agatha Christie principle of a scintillating murder: get a nice chap, one of our sorts to do it, and it’ll engender a particular kind of thrilling horror. And then, of course, this could be the most taboo form of murder: filicide; a mother killing her own child. Then there are massive financial dealings, allegations of lies (was Sheena, Indrani’s sister or daughter?) and even whispers of incest (she was both sister and daughter).

Fascinated reactions

As a result, people have had a grand time of getting scandalised with this case, bringing down the full weight of their shock and moralising to what has now become a full-blown tamasha. (No other word captures this as well; as Salman Rushdie once wrote, “The English lacks the thunderclap sound of the Urdu”). 




 

Others, while not so obviously voyeuristic, still pitched in, playing amateur detective on their 15-minute cigarette break on a Thursday (Twitter, it seems, is the new water cooler).



Of course, all that moderation was yanked out when another prurient revelation hit the airwaves

 

Even this disclosure, though, once the shock had died down a bit, was subject to thorough logical scrutiny (or whatever the closest thing that Twitter has to that).



 

The more cultured Tweeters though, immediately caught on to an art film link.

 

Media reportage

In all of this, the media had a staring role, playing up to the hilt a story that was almost too salacious to be true.

Like in the Aarushi Talwar case, the first thing the media did was to quickly make up its mind about who the killer was: Indrani Mukerjea. The Times of India had in fact, already gone a step further and was “nailing her lies”.



Even worse, India TV even held her guilty for being a ­– please don’t read further if you’re below 18 ­– “party lover and globetrotter”.

 

What was driving this media reaction?


 

And then, of course, there was the immense pressure of numbers; the desperation to attract eyeballs. Everyone did that to some extent but the first place for this endeavour, along with the runner up as well as third place, was won by this piece, which used the Bora murder to argue the rather bold proposition that there’s nothing wrong with a “brother and sister falling in love” (Before Cersie and Jamie Lannister "like" this, let me point out that the headline is misleading: the article speaks of cousin, not sibling love. Phew.)

At the other end of the scale from incest, the Bora murder also launched a discussion on the much more comfortably mundane topic of the irregular Roman orthography of Indian names.

Suhel Seth, never one to be left behind on gossip of such massive propositions, jumped in with his own jaunty tale of the time he had tried to woo Indrani Mukerjea.

Last and least, there was the tiny minority who wanted to bring in law and ethics into this discussion and pull the plug on all the great fun everyone was having.