Death, be proud.

When someone dear is dying, sleep flees the night before the event that will not pass.

After she passes away, and the mind overcomes numbed fatigue, you fall into the most peaceful, Kaliphos-induced, trance-like sleep.

And, when you awake the next morning, it is as though the mind has purged itself of all the tension, the despair, the dread.

You awake, recharged. Invigorated. And remind yourself that life is to be spent living; not worrying or dying.

It is almost as though death gives new life to life itself.

Forget Donne: Death, be proud.

The Last Lecture

On this date, in 2002, I went in for my second surgery to remove a stubborn, ruptured appendix. Not too many people remember this but I was reminded of it yesterday by one who does. It was a surgery that could've killed me but I survived and went on to have some of the best few years of my life after that.

Today, in the mail, I got to know of Randy Pausch. He was a professor of computer science, human-computer interaction and design at Carnegie Mellon. A terminal pancreatic cancer patient, Randy decided on June 26 this year (my birthday, incidentally) that he was stopping all treatment. A month later, yesterday, he died in faraway Virginia, USA. 

I hadn't even heard of the man but if you see this recording of his last lecture in September 2007 at Carnegie Mellon, it'll tell you more about life than about death.

Google Death

Don McLean makes an iPod come alive early in the morning:



Which then takes the wandering mind to Gharonda:



And from there to John Donne.

The question is: will Google ever be able to make these actually-not-so-random connections when you search for 'death' and end up with about 581,000,000' results of which the first is this, according to which I will die in 2019?

Am I over-obsessed with death? Worry not folks 'cause as Donne wrote: '...death, thou shalt die.'

Surviving

Why is that we spend all our lives trying to live a better life when all that lies at its end is death?

Why is it that a 'better life' has to translate into more money? A car instead of a motorbike. Two cars instead of one. An apartment. Clothes. Shoes...

Why is that we spend so much time chasing things and not enjoying what exists?

This isn't called living, it's called surviving.

And, to survive, is to live with what is left.

Only the good die young?

Off Park Circus in Calcutta, down Zakaria Road, lies a Hindu cemetery. (Yes, some Hindus do get buried, not cremated.)

That’s where He was buried exactly 13 years ago, to this day.

His father didn’t even see His face, just held the little lifeless bundle, lost to the family, wrapped in cloth. Joy turned into almost instant, inexplicable despair.

Nor did he go to the graveyard. He couldn’t. The boy hadn’t survived more than 20 minutes after His birth. But the living needed looking after.

So the father didn’t bury Him; His uncles did.

Was it Billy Joel who sang “Only the good die young”?

Try explaining this to His grandmother, whose birthday it also is today. Or to the wife who carried him within her all those nine months?

Tell me, Mr Joel: if the good do die young, is it the bad that die old?

Remote (out of) Control

We weren’t the first family in the building to own a TV set way back in the days when there was just one channel and no one more entertaining than Tabassum to watch on Phool Khile Hain Gulshan Gulshan (Mr Karan Johar, please note: no coffee, just dimple-cheeked Tabby talking non-stop while the person she was interviewing tried valiantly to get a word in edgeways). No MTV, just Chitrahaar. The brand we bought was Televista, not Weston or Beltek, because it had sliding doors that shielded the precious glass screen. So, we weren’t the first family with a TV set but we were the only ones who allowed the neighbours and everyone else in the vicinity to happily crowd our drawing room when the film was telecast on Saturday (Bengali) and Sunday (Hindi). No Act II popcorn, no Coke, just water or tea and some home-made Sindhi-style pakoras depending on Mummy’s energy levels keeping up with her generosity quotient.

And there was one number Pye radio set whose valves took time to light up as we waited in anticipation while Dad tuned the knobs to get the right frequency and expose us to Ameen Sayani from Radio Ceylon doing the Binaca Geetmala. Or the cricket commentary on Vividh Bharati.

Life was boringly simple. And we yearned for variety.

Yesterday, I wanted to rewind my life and get back to those days.

Because yesterday it finally struck me that my life – always run by remote control by some unseen hand(s) – had been taken over by four remote controls that sat beside me. Lifeless but capable of ruling one’s life completely.

A remote control for the three-year old TV (a Sony Wega that’s working perfectly fine but will probably get exchanged for a flat-screen plasma TV because, again, we’re not the first family in the building to show off a wall-mounted piece of plastic electronic art).

Another for the Pioneer DVD player that came in from a trip to Malaysia four years ago.

A third for the eight-year old Sony music system that’s been connected to the TV to create a home-theatre like sound system.

And the latest entrant to the RC clan is the one that comes with the Tata Sky set top box.

Now, try and watch a movie with everything on (including the Tata Sky box on just in case one of your children sleepily saunters in looking for that missing teddy and you don’t want her looking at a scene that’s a bit steamy and need to quickly change channels pretending you’re watching the news!). No immediate problem until the power goes off and everything shuts down till the generator kicks in somewhere and you need to restart everything. That’s when you realise that irrespective of whether you have two hands or four or none (in case you encountered a Gabbar-like character who took them away) remote controls work one at a time. No two will work simultaneously when pointed in the same direction.

You struggle to gain mastery over these six-inch long objects and wonder if it’s all worth it. They’re making you lazy and they’re not exactly the most co-operative or intuitive pieces of technology, are they?

And then, you ask yourself: if buttons are all I have to hit, why can’t I punch the right ones in my life?

Why can’t I get back control of a life that’s supposed to be mine?

Why, like the plethora of TV channels that get beamed at us, do we have to multi-task and live multiple lives within this one life?

Why can’t we control the remotes?