Life and Death in this world

  

This week's prompt is Friday Writings #227: As You Wish

When I think of a quote from the movie The Princess Bride, I remember: 

“Death cannot stop true love. All it can do is delay it for a while.”

Those words reminded me of something I had written many years back, and I felt like sharing it once again....

Life, death, and life after death have always been the turf of philosophers, thinkers, and religious gurus. Through the ages they have reflected, debated, and put forward their own theories about the beginning of life on this planet and what possibly awaits beyond it. 

Scientists, on the other hand, have been peering into outer space and digging out fossils from the earth, trying to uncover clues about the advent of life on our planet. Life and death are also part of our everyday existence. So naturally, we lesser mortals have never been totally immune to developing our own theories and discussing them passionately with anyone willing to lend an ear. 

The debate continues endlessly — whether there was indeed a creator behind all earthly life forms, as suggested by the watchmaker analogy, or whether life evolved gradually according to the theory of Charles Darwin. And perhaps the even bigger debate, cutting across both scientific and non-scientific minds, is whether life truly continues beyond death. 

It is a question that has fascinated humanity for centuries, yet remains wrapped in mystery despite all our knowledge and progress.

But once in a while, we come across incidents that unsettle our logical ideas and leave us wondering.

Recently, two news reports involving accidental deaths caught my attention, and I thought I should share them here. Were these merely coincidences, happenings dictated purely by chance? Or is there indeed some invisible conductor orchestrating everything that goes on in this world?

Questions like these leave us thoughtful and unsettled, with no practical way of ever finding a definite answer.......

Zooming In Disorder

One day, a few years back  I had a strange urge to pinch on a photograph  on a construction magazine while reading an article. I wanted to expand a picture to find out more about a detail and almost did it. It would have been perfectly normal if I was reading the same article in the iPad, but unfortunately it a conventional paper version of the weekly magazine.

Yesterday we wanted to read the details of an address written in in very small fonts on a bottle wrapper and this time we wished we could pinch to clarity.

Pinch here describes a gesture used with two fingers used on a touch screen interface to zoom in and out. We pinch inwards to zoom in on a picture and outwards to zoom out of a picture or object.

As the line between our digital and non-digital life gets blurred, can this be then considered to be a "zooming in" disorder! I am quite confident that with the dominance of touch screen steadily increasing in our lives, others are suffering from this disorder too.

This post from 2014 has been edited and re-posted as it relevance has increased exponentially.