A Summer of Sadness
It has been a Summer of sadness.
For me as for many millions of Indians, the sudden exit of three political bigwigs
of Delhi in quick succession has left a void that cannot be easily filled.
Though they belonged to different parties and different ideologies, all three
had distinct qualities that made them stand apart from other politicians. These
three in their discrete ways raised the standard of Delhi life and contributed
to a more orderly, more articulate and more energetic system of civil polity.
Sheila Dikshit’s administrative skills, Sushma’s oratorical brilliance and
Jaitley’s political suavity are examples of a modern, mature and aspirational
India.
This summer has been the cruelest summer personally for me. As a lover
of literature it was a sad summer with the passing away of a hat trick of great
writers like Girish Karnad, Kiran Nagarkar and Krishna Sobti. In addition,
there was the demise of half a dozen of my neighbours besides two of my close friends one after the other. One of them was a
colleague for more than twenty-five years, an intelligent, well read, gracious
and warm person and the other was our family Jeeves who had become more of a
brother to all of us during our seven decades association. However much one can
philosophize about life and death, it is difficult to remain a stoic when
confronted with the finality of the end of a particular phase of one’s life.
The years that remain will necessarily be a new phase on a broken keel in the
absence of all those who have disappeared forever.
I realized that death is a shattering
experience for all those left behind as we often hear the still sad music of
humanity at different times from different places. As
I drove down the street where my colleague had lived, it crossed my mind that for
her this will no longer be the road she had frequently travelled. We mourn the
dead, but actually our sadness is more for our own plight of having to live the
rest of our life without the ones who were dear to us. The new phase is unsettling
to say the least in the absence of those who had . been a part of our life.
The irrevocable finality of life’s extinction has been poignantly sung
by the 18th C poet Thomas Gray iihis Elegy written in a Country Churchyard. The following lines affirm
the no return of the dear departed as nothing can rouse the dead back to life,
nothing of life’s little joys or excitement can disturb them from their eternal
sleep.
The breezy call of incense-breathing Morn,
The
swallow twitt'ring from the straw-built shed,
The cock's shrill clarion, or the echoing
horn,
No
more shall rouse them from their lowly bed.
For them no more the blazing hearth shall
burn,
Or
busy housewife ply her evening care:
No children run to lisp their sire's
return,
Or
climb his knees the envied kiss to share.
But the truth is we do not mourn so much the dead as we
mourn our own existence. Our tears may seem to be tears for the departed, but
the tears are more for us, left orphaned by a decisive curtain call. But what
about those who have transited –God only knows where to except that they have
rent all the bonds that had till then tied them to their family, their home,
their profession, their friends, their enemies… Nothing of those long years of
human bondage has any meaning for them- not even a faint recollection of the
world they had all this while belonged to. In the lines of Wordsworth,
Our birth is but a sleep and a
forgetting:
The Soul that rises with us, our
life's Star,
Hath had elsewhere its setting,
And cometh from afar
This is the wonder of wonders. We forget the
moment we exit from the world. When we re-enter, we have no recollection of any
of the bonds we had held onto in our previous birth. Hindu religion does not speak of Hell or
Heaven as post- life destination, but of reincarnation which is the belief in
the rebirth of the soul in a new body or a new form. The belief in reincarnation becomes significant as it helps
to facilitate human beings to follow a
life of virtue to ensure a better life in the future birth. Unlike the
Christian-Muslim view that our lives begin at birth and will continue
after death in heaven or hell, the Hindu theory of reincarnation is far more
reassuring. Thus the incentive for a Hindu to be
good is like opening a savings deposit that can be encashed in the next birth. In a
brilliant analysis of this theory of reincarnation in his latest book Why a Hindu should be Good, Shashi
Tharoor says the incentive for a Hindu to be good is to have a better and more
decent birth in the future.
He writes : “whereas in Christianity the body has a soul, in Hinduism the soul has
a body. In other words, we are emanations of a universal soul, the atman, which
does not die; it discards its temporal form, the body, from time to time…”
Even if such a theory has no
empirical evidence, ( for that matter what empirical evidence is there that after
death we go to heaven or Hell and where are these situated) it helps us to
reconcile that what we are in our present life is the result of what we were in
the previous birth. The soul is permanent and the body is temporary. There is
no cessation of universal order which goes through the repetitive movements of
birth and death as the soul transits from one body to another. Death marks the
shedding of one body and birth marks taking possession of another. This
continues till the soul attains its goal of self realization and attains moksha
or final merger with the Oversoul or the Brahman from where it had originally
descended.
This gives a plausible reason why
we have no knowledge of our previous existence. Every birth is like starting
over with a new clean slate. When we come into the world, we don’t carry any
baggage of ill will or hatred as a carryover from the previous birth and all
possible acts of revenge and anger and nurturing of grievances and hostility
automatically get eliminated. It is another thing if one develops fresh enmity
and hatred, but the incentive to be good to ensure better future birth can act
as a deterrent from evil actions.
Birth and death are two ends of
life. We are aware and conscious only of these two end points and the moment we
cease to breathe, life comes to a halt. Even cancerous cells that furiously
survive by eating into the vitals of a human being die along with the rest of
the body. With death everything comes to
a full stop and there is no place for any other punctuation mark- be it a
question mark or a comma to find connections between the present and the
future. Pre- birth and post -death are blanked out and one is left with just
the present. It is therefore in our own
interest- both for the present and for the future- to live the one and only life
that we know and live it well. Living happily is contingent upon the happiness
of all others who are a part of our life. No one can be singly happy if others around
are unhappy. Envy, greed, anger, egoism and vengeful hostility are the end
products of our attempt to widen the gap between self and others. It is often
said means are as important as ends. If the ends are towards garnering a better
life in the future birth, means have to be ethical, moral and just.
In this summer of sadness, I
realized how we think of our own deprivation when we lose someone .
For the first time when I began to
reflect on where that soul could have
gone and whether it will ever have a re-connect with the present, I
understood the vacuity of such questionings. Those who have left will not
return or even if they return, it will be a new avatar with no memory of a past
link.
This is the way life goes on
This is the way life begins
This is the way life ends,
Not with tears of sadness for what
is gone
But with tears of joy for what
comes after.
