In Mumbai, more than 50 people have applied for the job of hanging the surviving gunmen in the 2008 Mumbai attack. Some come from families of executioners. Some really want to hang people.
They like how it feels to slide a black hood over a condemned person’s head. Applying grease to the noose to make sure it slides freely and the explosive sound of moving the lever so the floor parts like the Red Sea, are uplifting to them.
It’s apparently the preferred method of execution in India and with increases in population, crime increases and spreads; and with that virus, the hangman cometh.
Dressed in black; with brass framed aviator shades covering any hint of an eye, or a twitch, or rapid flutter. Most would like to wear the long coat tails of the vintage hangmen from the western movies. Even in India. (a terrible pun, I know)
They practice using bags filled with sand. They don’t seem to get as much joy filling a bag with sand as they do with the idea of watching a body airless for a split second – the level jacks forward, the floor parts beneath the feet, and for just a hair of a second, they’re still – then they drop like a boulder into a calm lake.
The important thing is to make sure that their neck snaps and there is a quick death.
All that wiggling and jiggling of the hand-tied human being covered to his shoulders with a black hood is unsettling to the required witnesses. They’re like the people who would rather take a pill to lose weight than to diet and exercise. Just hang them, please.
And, while this seems to be contrary to the spirituality the nation’s marketers have labeled it with, the Indians can be just as cruel to animals or human begins as any other non card-carrying member of the human race.
A hangman earns $60 or less per hanging. India’s last hanging was in 2004. But, with increased crime and a reported availability of cheap guns, the math could work out. If a guy is living on $60 per week he only needs to hang 4 people a month. This would go to his rent and electric, cable, internet and food.
There are 350 people on death row. That’s a good couple of years of work for several guys.
(source: LA Times 12-19-2011)
