Tag: death

  • < /life > < death >

    So, ‘Oh Wow. Oh Wow. Oh Wow‘ has now been pretty much immortalised. I began to wonder about last words and coincidentally came across this article around the same idea.  As the article states, Steve Jobs “managed to bring the same sense of wonderment to death as he did to life.”

    Few people, I’d think, would like to dwell on their mortality. I am not sure if it was because this topic was playing in the background (in my mind), but I began noticing a lot of deaths recently. Some old, some middle aged, and famous enough in some context to appear in a newspaper. There were important death anniversaries too. There was also the death of a 25 year old, who could technically be termed a 2nd degree  connection. Jobs knew it was coming, and had probably prepared himself for it. But the deaths I read about happened either after a few days in hospital, or a few hours, or were accidents.

    I wondered how many are prepared for their death, let alone ready with their last words. The 25 year old, from what I read and heard, would just have had enough time to mourn himself and the utter meaninglessness of it all! At least, that was my first thought – so, so early. Set to start his first job next month, life was just about to begin for him. Until a terminal disease strikes or the actual time of death, does anyone even understand the implication of mortality? What would be the last thought playing in the head? Probably we only have enough time to think “Oh my god (non-atheists), I’m about to die”. Some would have their loved ones around, some not. Some might go blank, some would want to say something and they may or may not have the ability to do so. Some would ask a higher power for more time, some might be thankful that it’s all ending. Does the life actually flash before one’s eyes? If so, is that preparation for something else?

    Why did Jobs use those words? Had he only just realised how much he had changed the world? Was it wonderment at the thought that irrespective of what one achieved, this was the equaliser? That this was how it would end, for everyone. Or was it just the awe of everything that he understood as life, coming to an end? Or did he see something else that caused the wonderment – a glimpse of what lay beyond?

    It is often said that the best way to live life is to live in the moment. Does it also include death? Death of the moment? Death of the ‘me’ in that moment?

    until next time, live long and prosper 🙂

  • Running for eternity

    I must confess that I didn’t like Mitch Albom’s “Tuesdays with Morrie” as much as his other book “The Five People you meet in heaven“, but writing anything negative about a non-fiction book such as this is not in good taste, so I refrained from doing a review. I also think that it is not so much a bad book and this takeout is more to do with my evolution than the writing or the concept itself.

    The good thing though is that it does have quite a few nuggets that you can chew on for quite some time. 🙂 This is my attempt to thread together a few. To be precise, three of my favourites.

    At least a couple of times in the second half, Morrie talks about how people run after the next house, vacation, car, job etc because they think that this will grant them the elusive ‘meaning, and how our culture has ‘forced’ people to feel threatened when they stand to lose their materialistic gains. This is what makes money God, and them mean. This is, of course, completely debatable, but I brought this up only for context. It led me to think that how, in infancy and in old age (from several instances I have seen, read about) and perhaps sickness, we are more concerned with needs, and at all times in between, it moves towards wants.

    On a tangent, I remembered the ‘proof of good times’ thought that I’d shared earlier, more than a year back, in ‘Progress Report‘, and how we capture images and notes, sometimes for ourselves, and sometimes for others. Ourselves, for memories, and perhaps posterity, and others, because, I thought ubiquitous social connectivity is perhaps making us inadvertently live a life we want to portray to others. I discovered a nice usage in the book that connected to this thought of eternity attempts “And tapes, like photographs and videos are a desperate attempt to steal something from death’s suitcase“.

    And while on posterity and eternity, the last one, a quote from Henry Adams “A teacher affects eternity, he can never tell where his influence stops”. I think, in that sense, every being is a teacher, and thus lives on.

    until next time, wednesdays with manuscrypts, okay? 😉

  • A small matter of life and death

    There’s this wonderful scene in ‘The Hurt Locker’ in which James talks to his baby son who is fully engrossed in playing with his toys

    You love playing with that. You love playing with all your stuffed animals. You love your Mommy, your Daddy. You love your pajamas. You love everything, don’t ya? Yea. But you know what, buddy? As you get older… some of the things you love might not seem so special anymore. Like your Jack-in-a-Box. Maybe you’ll realize it’s just a piece of tin and a stuffed animal. And the older you get, the fewer things you really love. And by the time you get to my age, maybe it’s only one or two things. With me, I think it’s one.

    Its probably a generalisation, but I’m sure many people can identify with that. Figuring out at some point, that all the things and people they cherished, or they themselves, have moved on. In fact, there are many who might be even more unfortunate and realise that have nothing to love, going through the motions of life, as a job to be finished. But it could be even worse.

    Quite a morbid line of thought, but one that I felt compelled to share, because it made me think about so many things we take for granted. Sometime back, I had written about the ‘alone’ people I see in many places. Well, there’s another kind of people I have seen – sometimes during daily commute, at other times, when I travel.

    The kind of people who make me wonder what it is that makes them hold on to their life. The easiest example I could give are the beggars – no, not the ‘professional’ ones who haunt our traffic signals, but the ones that frequent obscure places, where there’s hardly a chance of them getting anything, the ones who don’t even ask. They sometimes look too old or invalid to move out of there. There are other examples too, ones that need not be at such levels of despair, but you probably get the drift.

    So what makes them plod on? A hope that things will become better? A dogged belief in the sanctity of life? A dull notion that life has to be lived on unto its natural conclusion? Or maybe they are in a state where they’re okay with what they’ve to live with or what life will dish out next? Or maybe they’re afraid that the experience after death will be worse.

    I’ll end where I started from – ‘The Hurt Locker’. To quote James again ‘Everyone’s a coward about something.‘ Sometimes it’s life, and sometimes it’s death.

    until next time, alive and clicking 🙂

  • Game Theory

    There’s this favourite t-shirt of mine – “If you’re interested in time travel, meet me last thursday”. I’ve always been interested in dimensions, thanks to science fiction and Skeletor/Sorceress in the He-Man series opening portals in other dimensions outside the physical constraints of Eternia. That perhaps explains the recurrence of alternate realities  and parallel universes in the blog.

    S and I had this interesting discussion recently on dimensions. No, don’t run away, it wasn’t really a scientific discussion.  I definitely am not qualified for one anyway, though at a concept level, I think it did get close to M-theory. (no relation to this blog 🙂 )  It was based on an abstract thought that on one hand, time is getting crunched and so is space, so where is all the crunched ‘stuff’ going. My point of view was that, time was expanding not crunching, since technology has made it easier for me to do things in shorter time, so it would perhaps balance the space crunch. No, conference calls don’t count, that works the other way. Space is no longer crunched, because calls are taken on the mobile, so conference halls are not required, and sigh, the calls last forever. 😐

    The thought I had though, was that the relationship (space-time) was being defined in/by the reality around us. What if there were other dimensions involved which were affecting this relationship? Do they exist? Will we unlock them? Will they be the answers to the occurrences that we cannot explain within our current dimensional knowledge? Funnily, these questions pop up whenever I play with the shiny new toy called Foursquare, and see people unlocking badges.

    At a basic level, badges get unlocked after specific user experiences – some repetitions, some new ones. I always equate them to new dimensions we observe in our personality after different experiences. That’s a kind of unlocking too, no? All of that brings me to another unanswered question. Is what we call death is actually the ‘experience’ we need to have to unlock another dimension? Or maybe we’ll need the other dimensions only after the death experience? Just like a regular multi level game. 🙂

    until next time, death is a great leveler? 🙂

    PS. What if the experience we understand as ‘death’ is ‘living’ in another dimension? I wonder then if cremation hurts, but our expressions in the other dimension cannot be heard here. Brr..

  • Fire Drill

    A few years ago, 3 to be precise, I might’ve been in the thick of it. The fire at Carlton Towers. My visiting card then carried this – Mid Day, 301, Carlton Towers…. No, I wouldn’t have been tweeting, because twitter would come into my life only three months later. But perhaps this was the reason the entire scenario bothered me, even as I sat watching the Twitter stream and the reactions. At first, i thought it was some minor mishap, and even cracked a mallu pun at TGIF’s expense. (@mixdev reminded me of that yesterday) But later, of course, I realised it wasn’t.

    I don’t watch news channels, so I was spared the repeated shots (a good post by my friend Nishant) of those tragic jumps. I was watching the stream though, and kept seeing retweets of @jackerhack , who was stuck in the building. I read about people jumping from the windows, and my first reaction was what the hell was wrong with them? What did they expect, a bloody bed of roses??!! And then I realised that there was no way I could even imagine, let alone understand what they must’ve felt in those moments. The closest I could get to is perhaps when I have trouble breathing. Now these are very very minor asthmatic attacks, but even then I know the intense desire to get one lungful of air. And that’s perhaps just a decimal percentage of the trauma those poor poor souls must’ve gone through.

    Trivialisation bothers me. I still read Malayala Manorama daily, and my biggest grouse with them is the way they capture deaths. Not events like the above, but individual deaths. Though I realise its perhaps a way of communicating to those who might not have known, reducing a life (and its end) to a few column cms with a matter-of-fact headline bothers me. Perhaps its some sort of block towards mortality. When @jackerhack ‘s (okay, he has a ‘real’ name, and its easier to type – Kiran), so, when Kiran’s tweets were retweeted by everyone who had access to an enter button, it somehow reminded me of the above. After some time, when he tweeted about not panicking, I was even mildly irritated. (Sorry!) If it was meant for the twitter audience, i was wondering whether the majority of the audience cared for him enough to panic, and for those who did care for him, I wondered if the words would do any good. Was the twitter crowd mature enough not to panic, or not to see this all as a “ok, big event happening, let me part of it” thing? Are we really so different from the media we claim to hate?

    Now he bloody obviously had reasons to do what he did, which he has articulated very well on his blog. I read and re-read and even before that, could empathise. And so, this is not so much about him as it is about us. Us, the crowd which blocked the roads there to take a look, us who sat watching on the tube or the stream, us the viewers and readers, us the voyeurs, and definitely me, who writes a post. Death makes a good story. With apologies to the few who don’t look at it that way, I wonder if being part of the excitement has taken a whole new turn when we’ve become the media on Twitter. Unlike the case with other media, when the crowd creates and consumes, who can complain? Yes, there are many cases in which relief and charity work have been augmented by Twitter, but this wasn’t such a case. Hopefully, all this is just me 🙂

    until next time, false fire alarms?