The Million Dollar Question

Where am I? Who am I?
How did I come to be here?
What is this thing called the world?
How did I come into the world?
Why was I not consulted?
And If I am compelled to take part in it,
Where is the director?
I want to see him.
                                                  -Soren Kierkegaard

Sitting in the class, listening to the lecturers has very few merits but listening to the insightful questions that come up now and then. I have to give the credit to those who can do it, those who can ask the right question.

I, for myself, don’t have this amazing quality of asking remarkable questions (like most of us). You can always tell whether someone is clever by their answers but to know about wisdom, you will have to go by their questions. Normally, it’s not the answer that amuses me but the question. I don’t care how it’s answered, but the right question asked in the right way often points to its own answer and untangles a labyrinth of thoughts inside you that won’t ask for answers immediately.

At the same time, every question does not deserve an answer. You must have faced several interviews. The questions I fall silent upon every time are “why should we take you” or “where do you see yourself five years from now”. I mean what on earth should one answer apart from bragging oneself in front of the interviewer. But then, that’s the catch there.
Coming back to Questions, I recently encountered the most touted question ever: “I like someone who doesn't know I like her. How can I tell her?" I don’t know what made him think I would be eligible to answer that but then as I said the question is more important than the answer. I asked him to tell her the same thing, ask her the same question. Ask her how she would like to be told you love her. I still have to know whether that helped (Since he was bewildered and gutless at the same time, I doubt he ever asked).

So that’s where I leave things. It is better to know some of the questions than all of the answers. Before doing anything, if you are sure why you are doing it and what is going to motivate you, the job is half done. Keep asking questions, that the only thing that will keep you from complacency.

Matter of life and death

Someday I'll be a weather-beaten skull resting on a grass pillow,
Serenaded by a stray bird or two.
Kings and commoners end up the same,
No more enduring than last night's dream.

I am pretty sure death is not something you think about everyday(even butterflies don't', but that's different)Neither I want you to, but it surely deserves to be peeped in once  in a while. Its can very simply be put in the words of Leonardo da Vinci “As a well-spent day brings happy sleep, so a life well used brings happy death”. Now whether it is “happy” or not depends on lot of things. But if you look it from a different angle, everyone is immortal in his reference as he  may know that he is going to die, but he can never know that he is in fact dead.

Anyway, there is so much suffering (read dying) around that does it really matter which one of them is death?  If you really look inside people, they don’t fear death but the fear of its strike. The moment is what they try to defy, everything after that is incognito.

There is certainly a life after death (No! I am not talking about mummies). Albert Einstein professed that our death is not an end if we can live on in our children and the younger generation.  For they are us, our bodies are only wilted leaves on the tree of life.  There are three facets to this whole phenomenon. The first is obviously the historic one where Egyptians believed that people live a second life after death and they mummified bodies and kept belongings the deceased might need later. The second one is religious where people believe in the concept of “Moksha” and the theory of heaven and hell which we undergo depending on our “Karma” while we were alive. The third and the most practical facet is..well lets put it this way, do you think Mahatma Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln  or for that matter Einstein really dead? No they are not, they will live till eternity because of the unparalleled impact they have on us.

So you see, death may be the greatest of all human blessings because it’s the only way to live forever. You can be, after death, what you can never be when you are alive. In the cycle of pouring life into death and death into life without a drop being spilled, lays the salient truth that we control what will happen after we die and instead of fearing the same we can build the path after the dead-end.

I knew a man who once said, "Death smiles at us all; all a man can do is smile back."  -From the movie Gladiator