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...

Recent days have seen some known personalities succumb to various types of cancer. Patrick Swayze Farrah Fawcett Sen. Ted Kennedy Lisa Ray has recently revealed that she has been diagnosed with multiple myeloma . I wonder what effect these sort of news have on the general population. People in India, in particular tend to have strange attitudes towards diseases in general ... huge numbers of Indians still believe in quaint stuff like astrology. Indians probably still believe that if somebody gets cancer or some such dreadful disease, it might have something to do with their past misdeeds and the disease might be a manifestation of God's anger writ large. When faced with personal disasters such as these, Indians tend to react in weird ways. They tend to start visiting temples and stuff and do more than the usual quota of beseeching God(s). I find this silly, hilarious, and even irritatingly stupid. Let me explain. I can say from personal experience how medical science has been a re...

I was wondering why it is that humans are mostly interested in trivialities. The deep things to consider in life, I believe, could be these: what are the goals we have in life, what is the impact of our actions on the larger society, to question whether social traditions and customs serve a purpose or are merely deadweights, and always try to have some perspective about whatever joys and sorrows come our way in life. I must have missed many things in the above random list. We can add and subtract from this list. I am somehow interesting in reading about palliative care specialists ... the challenge of caring for an ageing population is a clear and present challenge for advanced nations and an emergent challenge or a lurking one for developing nations like India. It's therefore instructive to learn about how developed nations are coping with this issue. Recent days have seen a sustained rise in the prices of groceries in India. That would not be such a big issue in developed nations...

I don't know why it hit me like a shock when I heard the news of his passing. May be, it's because I keep track of things closely, but I anyhow felt like a family member had passed away. The lesson I learnt from watching the eulogies and reading about him is that one can commit mistakes in life and pick up the pieces and move on. That's a very important lesson to be learnt for fallible mortals like me.