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...

What is it that draws us to a news such as the untimely death of a celebrity? Whether it's Diana or Michael Jackson or Elvis Presley and John Lennon and so many others? Now we have the untimely, tragic death of a teenage son of a cricket star. It must tell us something about ourselves above all. Are we attracted to these events by any chance because at some level, we somehow prove ourselves to be superior to the dead by having simply outlived them? After all, one of our most fundamental biological traits must be the desire to stay alive for as long as possible. Whatever else it's that you want to do, you have to be alive in the first place to be able to accomplish that. Celebrities are celebrities in the first place because we choose to idolize them. This idolization perhaps involves both admiration and envy. We must envy celebrities as they have surely achieved success in life in any of the myriad ways in which we may choose to define the term. Thus w...

What could be the motivation? Well, good stories sell. Novelists and storytellers have all the freedom in the world. Screenwriters even in biopics do not mind using a bit of artistic license to imagine a scene. If you can use reality as the base and add some embellishment and fine tuning and a dose of heroism and sacrifice to make the story appear more heroic and more emotional, what's wrong with that? The world is a bit too crowded with heroes and tales of heroism. So, it's a bit tough to stand out if one sticks strictly to the truth and nothing but the truth. So, who are the heroes? Well, creating an appropriate image is incredibly important. Bill Clinton is living proof of that. Mother Teresa and Diana are dead proofs. No matter how convincingly Christopher Hitchens is able to demolish myths of heroism and saintly qualities around these personalities, the public perception is so strongly rooted in the manufactured image that it's very difficult and nearly...

My debt of gratitude to Mr. Hitchens continues to grow. Not on a daily basis but every time I see an interview with him, I come out wiser after watching it. As a polemicist, Christopher has chosen to take on many individuals who have become larger than life. Mr. Hitchens has been a scathing critic of the false piousness of Mother Teresa. He has also been critical of the people's princess business with respect to Diana. Above all, Bill Clinton has been portrayed as a consummate and perhaps congenital smooth liar. That is where I came out with a lesson after watching Mr. Hitchens' interview yesterday. Mr. Clinton, it must be axiomatic, has to be narcissistic. So, why am I rooting for him? Why are so many? Indeed. Quite a point. It is perhaps yet another instance of how dangerously flawed we can be in our perceptions. We are perhaps giving a lot of leeway to Mr. Clinton because of his good looks. We may be doing this subconsciously without even realizing it. Perhaps, i...

Julia Roberts is in India and as usual there’s breathless reporting of the event — quite sickening. It always happens, of course — in my short life, I recall similar stuff from Michael Jackson’s visit to Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie’s visit. Also, Princess Diana’s visit had generated some amount of breathless reporting. But I guess the Princess must have been used to much worse tabloid and paparazzi stuff back home and in Europe and America. Rahul Mahajan wants to follow in the footsteps of Rakhi. Both are birds of the same feather of course. I wonder what people feel now that Rakhi has decided not to marry the guy she chose during her swayambar. Do people feel like she took them for a ride??? Or, are people still game for one more ride? I think there will be enough girls who would apply to be Rahul’s bride in spite of the fact that he is a once-married man who divorced his pilot wife. India is in the early stages of following a Western-style celebrity-culture and we can boast of our o...