The SSC students celebrated their success, books were launched, new political parties were floated, and we welcomed the rainy season with great fanfare. When all of these happened, the dead bodies of victims were still warm in their graves. This country didn't take time to mourn its dead.

May be I am being too sensitive. Time and tide don't wait for the living, let alone the dead. One can't blame the students for their excitement when they did so well in one of their defining exams. In some cities sweet shops did brisk business and ran out of stock in half hour's time. People who wrote books couldn't wait to share the good news with their readers. Political parties couldn't afford the delay in breaking the news. And the rainy season comes once in a year. How can we blame the culture vultures if they didn't want to miss that chance?

Believe me I am not trying to be finicky here. But this is not the first time, and we have repeated this insensitivity so many times in the past that, I am afraid, it is becoming the new culture.

Launches sank, buildings collapsed and people died in bomb explosions. One time I remember an ostensible wedding took place when half the country was submerged in water. Once again I say that may be I don't know how the world works. The law of supply and demand that applies to commodities also applies to human lives. In a country where people are dime a dozen, why cry for few lost ones?

Still it bothered me to watch the stark contrasts. It seemed like a nation had freaked out, and its mood swung from extremes of euphoria to extremes of distress. The death looked like explosion in a chocolate factory as the bodies were being pulled out of mud.

They looked like figured cookies dipped in syrupy earth. How unwarily they must have died, clueless that the same hills where they had come for shelter were crashing down to take their lives!

I am not going to write about those who are to blame for cutting the hills and then bringing this disaster, which has taken so many lives. It is just another example of corruption whose flames have engulfed us. It doesn't excite me anymore that we have more bad people. Yes we have them, many more hiding in the nooks and corners of this nation.

But this time the good people bother me, parents who have raised bright children, people who are enlightened enough to write books, intelligent enough to set up political parties and cultural enough to sing and dance. They baffle me because when they have all these good qualities, why couldn't they become better human beings? How couldn't deaths of others diminish them?

Probably that is the only thing that comes between good and bad. It is the capacity to feel the pain of others, which decides if someone has a conscience. People, who take lives, steal from others or put another life in danger, can qualify to be mafia bosses, hired killers or common thugs. Cruelty is two atrocities wrapped in one. It is atrocious once when the cruel act is committed and again when one doesn't feel the remorse.

Those who didn't bother to postpone their celebrations, where do they stand on the moral scale? They have no reason to feel guilty because they are not responsible for those deaths.

They are talented minds who can separate good from evil. If anything they have made the mistake of choosing the wrong time to rejoice over the right reasons. Not much blame goes to them. If one chooses to ignore timing, then they should be even praised.

However, there is perhaps one fine line that connects these good men with their bad counterparts. The people who dug those hills and turned them hollow and brittle were in a hurry. They couldn't wait to seize their moment lest they missed an opportunity.

They didn't care what would happen to people who lived at the foot of those hills. They didn't care how their actions were going to upset the balance of things. They were unfeeling men who desperately wanted to go after their own narrow interests.

It was the same hurry and desperation, which drove others to their euphoria at a time of distress. Could they do it if these deaths had taken place in their homes? Would they have liked it had their loved ones died instead and people wanted to sing and dance in front of their houses? The answer to both questions ought to be an emphatic no.

Because there is something called fellow-feeling, which simply means sympathetic awareness of others. This is the law of reciprocity-you must give in order to take, love in order to be loved and care in order to be cared. That reciprocity is the crux of civilization and it reckons that humanity is more than having hairy limbs, scary libido and bleary sense of life after death.

Humanity is about having a soul, which should work like a wide angle surveillance mirror. It should reflect what happens in rest of the store.

It looked bizarre as if this nation was alternating between smiling and sobbing, a frantic behavior that indicated that, whether enlightened or benighted, there is certain numbness in our heart.

We write books, push politics, excel in education and comprehend culture, yet we fail to feel anything when lives are lost. It was like drawing a circle without the centre. It was all about man, yet humanity wasn't there.

No credit please, I wept. But it was not for the dead but for the living. They have died before their death.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.