There are a few different ways in which South Asians say adieu to their dead and each poses a problem worth pondering. Burials require land, which is expensive. Some cemeteries in Europe have in fact started placing the coffins vertically to save on the spiralling cost of disposing the dead!

Cremation, which the Romans gave up centuries ago but that continues to be the preferred way to send off the dead in four of the eight Saarc countries, needs wood, which is expensive and also a load on the ecosystem. Electric crematoriums are being experimented with but they too are costly.

The Parsis were perhaps the most eco-friendly. They would place their departed ones atop the Tower of Silence, till the vultures, otherwise crucial to the circle of life, started dropping bits of the remains over posh Mumbai homes. Municipal requirements nudged the community to opt for burial instead. True to their spirit of accommodation, the Parsis followed the new rules without demure.

In the north-eastern tribal states of India, the dead are sometimes entombed with their belongings. There was a picture of his favourite Maruti 800 car placed over the grave of a tribal chief.

Bahadur Shah Zafar, the last Mughal emperor, was buried in exile; so was Begum Hazrat Mahal, the queen of Awadh. There is an old agreement, now perhaps mothballed, between the Indian and Pakistani governments to build a proper mausoleum over the Begum's grave, which lies abandoned in a street in Kathmandu.

Remembering the dead is ritually nurtured. Many though not all Muslims visit graveyards annually on a given night to pray for their ancestors. India has a protocol for official guests to visit the shrines of its political leaders like Nehru and his daughter. Paying floral respects to Mahatma Gandhi, the slain apostle of peace, is mandatory for foreign dignitaries.

Everything is not smooth in this. Gen Musharraf shunned ideological aloofness to offer flowers at Gandhi's Raj Ghat shrine but the king of Saudi Arabia cited religious constraints to refrain from honouring the world's best known (though marginalised at home) helmsman.

Not everyone in the culturally resplendent South Asia it seems has the time today, much less the inclination, to persist with a tradition they otherwise claim as an abiding debt to those that are no more. This sadly is a less acknowledged feature of our otherwise celebrated but evolving worldview.

A social activist was planning to celebrate her birthday in Delhi recently when she found herself heading on a bumpy jeep ride to a former bastion of Maoist guerrillas in Warangal, in the southern state of Andhra Pradesh. There she met a woman in her 30s who had served five years in prison and whose knees had been cracked by sustained torture because she was a guerrilla. Now the former guerrilla works with a dedicated group whose job it is to track the dead bodies of people killed in police encounters.

The group does what the International Committee of the Red Cross is globally mandated to do locate missing persons, track them if they are reported killed, find their bodies and hand them over to the relatives, who are mostly too poor to perform even the simplest of the last rites. So the virtually nameless group raises funds for a halfway decent farewell for an erratic stream of victims of police encounters. If and when a missing person is tracked and found abandoned, that is.

I have always marvelled at the ease with which a hidebound ritualistic people, devoted to the dead as they are to the living, manage to absolve themselves of responsibility so deeply ingrained in their culture when their humanity is most on test.

Last month the International People's Tribunal on Human Rights and Justice in Indian-administered Kashmir (IPTK) published a report on Jammu and Kashmir listing a number of unmarked and hitherto unknown graves of people buried without any acknowledgment or clue. 'In the 2,700 graves we investigated, the body count was 2,943 plus,' the report says. 'Within 2,700 graves, 154 graves contained two bodies each and 23 graves contained more than two cadavers. Within these 23 graves, the number of bodies ranged from three to 17.'

The bodies thus buried were 'routinely delivered at night,' some bearing marks of torture and burns, the 108-page IPTK report, including documentary evidence and photographs, says.

How this fares against the pain and tortured inflicted by Pakistani troops on their erstwhile Bengali citizens would not lessen the enormity of one brutality vis-à-vis another.

What the Sinhalese did with Tamils and the vendetta Tamil extremists wreaked on their fellow countrymen could never be exonerated on grounds that the gore is any less, for example, than what the Afghans, with or without foreign assistance, inflict on each other.

Nor does the plight of the ordinary people caught between the Maoists and the Nepalese military lessen the gruesome reality of their helplessness.

Today we see the world heading towards truth and reconciliation as the way out of intractable conflicts and to make this possible there is an attempt to put equal emphasis on truth as a key component of any future solution to global strife.

South Asia festers with a plethora of intractable and brutal conflicts. It is difficult to believe that we are going to continue to live in denial of our innate callousness. The dead pose a grave challenge to a possible chance at peace in South Asia. If we have a conscience, it is not an insurmountable challenge.