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.......

A hard Fact of Life - is our body changes with age

Change is the only constant in life while weight is the only constantly changeable truth!

As we move along the journey of our life we meet a lot of people and also leave them behind as we continue on our path. Sometime we do not remember much of that person anymore but certain comment or act of his stays with our for a long time. 

I remember one such statement which will make all the health conscious people shudder. While I was in Delhi we had an Accountant (a hot shot stock broker now) who used to come for a week every month and do the auditing and prepare our salary cheques. He was loud spoken north Indian with lots of anecdotes and excellent sense of timing. That made him very popular with this Bengali man who was just being exposed to Hindi and Punjabi languages.

Our usual lunch was dal makhani (black dal with white butter) and tandoori rotis with the option to top up with a quarter makhan or half makhan (25gm or 50 gm of amul butter). Then we were young and hungry, not at all perturbed with eating excesses or obesity. In case there was sense of a guilt creeping in while gobbling all those extra butter, his unforgettable comment would come to our rescue. 

He always used to quip "ki laike aya tha .. ki laike jayega? Jo khayega woh e saath jayega!" (what did you get along at your birth and what will you take along when you die? It's only what you eat that will stay with you till the end). I would not debate how prudent that statement was, but it definitely was helpful at that moment in time.

But when you come to think of it, this particular "saath jayega" stuff is quite intriguing. When you want it you do not get it and when you get it you find out that you got it in the wrong place and then you want to get rid of it you hardly succeed!

While in college I had done everything I possibly could to put some weight and have a bit of a noticeable body mass. I turned out to be too slippery to get anything stuck on me and my weight remained unchanged, as constant as the unit of measurements. Few years later things changed and I could feel the surge! It was a great feeling. But it soon turned out to be a present continuous tense. Initially a little bit of walking and gymming would do the trick and kept things under control. 

Slowly as life got busier and I kept postponing my mission to restart the exercise to tomorrow but to my surprise I was presented with a brand new tomorrow, each morning and I could never catch up! Finally a day came when I sadly realised that it was beyond my control and perhaps VLCC will not be of much help. 

One day I received a mail with pictures of some of the most sought after heroes of Hollywood. Well..... pictures speak louder than words!!! I am not alone!