Death

Guess what? It's Saturday! Perfect timing for another of my posts...

This time, it's about death.

Various dictionaries define death as the following:
"the event of dying or departure from life", "the permanent end of all life functions in an organism or part of an organism", "the absence of life or state of being dead", "the time when something ends" and "the time at which life ends"

The ideas for this post were thought up on a train journey (Mumbai-Goa or vice-versa) when I was discussing the concept of death with Vigi. We had quite a discussion about the same then...

I always thought of putting down what I thought as a blog post, but kept procrastinating, as it is my habit, till now, when certain events made me realize that I just simply had to write this post in the near future.

The idea of death isn't new to me. I had known it to be the inevitable end right since middle school. In first or second grade (don't remember which) I lost a classmate. I think his name was Varun. I may not remember most other details because my memories about school have grown quite blurry. Then again in high school, I lost another fellow student, this time a girl. She wasn't a classmate, but my mother told me what we had been in nursery school together. It's very unfortunate that I never had the opportunity to know them better. I only wish I had invested more time in interacting with them a bit more when I had the chance.

Then again, in BITS the trend continued.... Lost a person almost every year... Fellow students, director, what not... It's been very sad, but inevitable none the less. In fact, one of the students who passed away at BITS had been the immediate neighbour of one of my close friends. I know he was quite shaken knowing that he would never be able to see his neighbour's friendly face at BITS ever again.

So, back to the discussion we had. What is death? Death seems to be the ceasing of the existence of a living being, for any reason. But yea... I'm living, I experience myself inside me. Pain, pleasure, relief, anger... the entire gamut of 'feelings' and also memories and experiences I have gained through the process of 'living'. It's baffling that I am inside me, and not observing myself as a third person. That feels weird sometimes, especially when I think about it. It brings me to the question, what happens when I die? What happens to my 'self', my so-called 'feelings', 'memories'? Do they just disappear? Whoosh??? Or are they stored somewhere? What happens of my 'awareness' and my unwritten and unshared ideas?

All these questions bring me to a newer, and a more fundamental question...
We start 'living', grow up, learn, start earning, make a family, and then finally die. So what is the purpose of life? Is it just doing the above? All humans do that (I hope). So what makes me different from the rest? Am I just a tool in the propagation of the human race (and hopefully improving its genetic code through evolution) and nothing else? If so, life seems quite pointless, actually. These questions have been troubling me since a really long time, and unfortunately, I haven't found their answers yet. Maybe the answers lie in death itself. Maybe I will find out eventually (after I die?)

What I am more curious about is that have other people (my contemporaries, friends, whatever...) thought about these above questions themselves? Has it occurred to them that these questions are worth thinking about? If so, what are their views? I would really like to hear/read them. Maybe the reason I think about this so much is because I read certain books, mainly "Jonathan Livingston Seagull" and "Illusions: The Adventures of a Reluctant Messiah" both by Richard Bach when I was quite young. These books actually gave me quite a lot of new ideas and made me think deeper. I definitely recommend that you read these books when you do have the time. They're fairly simple to follow, and I believe they'll get you thinking at once.

These made me more 'comfortable' with the idea of death, and made me realize that even if people die (leave?), my life does go on, and new experiences and ideas will still be born (will they be of any importance?)

And so, I keep living my life, trying to hold on to people precious to me, spending as much time as I can with them, lest I lose them and have regrets later on...

Hope you do the same...

Rest in peace, all those who have moved on...

Later!