Fragility of Life

About three years ago, I was in Nepal at the Pashupathinath temple in Kathmandu. While I was just about to enter the temple, on the steps of the temple, I saw a man with a dead child in his lap, another guy next to him and a priest. They were next to a burning ghat and were getting ready to perform the last rites for the dead child. When I came back from the temple, the child was on the pyre and had not been completely covered. And I watched the man set fire to its body. This image has stayed with me for a while now. What must have been a bright young life had met an untimely end. I was a little shaken as the sight was fairly unusual. I was suddenly made aware of the fragility of our lives. We don’t really know when we will die. And life is the most precious possession we have.

Atleast some of us live in a world in which we are afraid of something we might lose. Our pride, when we ask someone for something and they refuse, an opportunity, when someone asks for us a bribe and we refuse, our money, if we put into something we are unsure of and that may not turn out well, etc. Essentially, due to fear of the loss, we compromise. We hide our true feelings and suppress our natural instincts. We do what is politically correct, what is beneficial, what will get the job done, etc.

The point is that the most precious thing in life is life itself (This is of course not an original thought and has been articulated elsewhere and perhaps in a better manner). Once that basic thought is established in our lives, we can reevaluate a lot of decisions on a basis different from the one we usually do on. As has been well explored in the world of literature and cinema, what a guy may do, when he knows suddenly that he has only a few days or a few hours to live is very different from how he leads his daily life till that moment of awareness.

If we refuse to compromise on how we want our world to be, knowing fully well that our life is temporary and uncertain, we would perhaps make bolder decisions, rather than trying to take a shortcut in the interest of immediacy.