Reading the obituary of a former secretary of Information Technology of Karnataka, I realized how insincere the obituaries churned out by our media are.  Read a bunch of obituaries and they all seem exactly the same, with only minor changes.  If the deceased was fifty years or less,  there'll be a line stating that 'he/she died very young, leaving many unfulfilled dreams' or something to that effect.  If the person was over seventy years old,  you'll see something like 'leaves behind a rich legacy.. his/her loss is a monumental one' etc.  They are so similar that I wonder if the media actually has a software that churns out these pithy obits, if given the name, age and gender as inputs.  It'll also invariably end with a line saying "He/she is survived by <insert list of surviving family members>".    There's also an unwritten rule in the media, never to bring up a person's less savory past while writing their obituaries.   I was tickled by an observation that even Bal Thackeray who went on tirades against Tamilians in the 80s and people from Bihar/UP in the 90s and 2000s was called a 'Nationalist' when he passed away.  Yes, racists, criminals, communal and parochial bigots are all remembered with reverence after they die.   I don't think pissing on people's graves is either nice or necessary,  but neither is glossing over a person's misdeeds and glorifying them, as the media tends to often do.