Rumi Nations

So how do people prepare for the time when they are dead? How well prepared are you? You could say that some people tend to be better prepared than others. People like Steve Jobs had cancer and battled it. Some forms of cancer like what Jobs had or what Christopher Hitchens had are incurable or on the borderline between curable and incurable. If you happen to get one of these ailments, of course you know that your time on Earth will soon be up. Not that anyone is ever immortal. So far. So I don’t know if it really matters much if we happen to get a form of cancer or inoperable brain tumor or glioblastoma like Ted Kennedy. And what does one do about one’s vast wealth after one’s body becomes one with nature? Well, luckily or unluckily, most of us in India don’t have to worry about such matters as not many of us are billionaires with our personal 30-storey buildings. But here are a few examples of some famous folks and their instructions about stuff to be done when they di...

President Obama was in Cairo recently and addressed students of Cairo University. Egypt is of course one of the oldest civilaztions on the planet with the pyramids having been built some 5,000 years ago — the human mind with a human lifespan of 60/70 years is certainly incapable of making sense of a timeframe that long. A city like Cairo must have seen so much through the thousands of years of its history. Today, it stands at the crossroads of the 'Clash of Civilizations' debate between Western and Islamic civilizations. President Obama sought to 're-connect' with the 'alienated' Muslim world by this speech. He addressed some central issues: Iran's march towards acquiring nuclear weapons, Israel's right to exist, the right of the Palestininian people to a homeland, the threat of Al Qaida and Taliban in Pakistan/Afghanistan, the plight of women ... or, the 'right' of women to live the way they want to ... whether they want to get educated and purs...