Life, death and beyond

ONE morning my door bell rang. I was not expecting anyone and have a notice by the bell-button reading, "Please do not ring the bell unless you are expected." I can be very short-tempered with unexpected callers. I opened the door prepared to give the intruder a sound ticking-off. There were two smartly dressed young Sardars, who spoke in an American accent. They apologised for not making an appointment and handed me a couple of tapes. "Lately you have been writing a lot about ageing and dying. We taped these talks on the topic and thought they would be of interest to you." I took the tapes, thanked them but did not ask them to come in. I took the tapes with me to Kasauli where I could listen to them alone and undisturbed.

The tapes were of talks given three years ago by Swami Sri Sri Ravi Shankar in Santa Monica, California. I had not heard of Swamiji but from the cover on the tape gathered that he is based in Bangalore and has a sizeable following abroad. His picture makes him out to be a man in his forties with jet-black hair falling to his shoulders and a flowing beard covering his chest. I switched on the tape entitled Death & Beyond. From the frequent applause and laughter, I could gather he was addressing a largish audience. He had good command over English and was lucid but often lapsed into Indian or American pronunciations. This is how it went. He started with the chant Om Namah Shivai in a not too melodious voice accompanied by a female acolyte. Perhaps this was to create an Indian atmosphere for an American audience. Swamiji began by asking the question: "What is death?" There was nothing very original in the answer he gave. He said death comes to everyone, the rich and the poor, the beautiful and the ugly, old and the young, strong and the weak, wise and the foolish, doctors and their patients — it spares no one: animals, birds, plants or insects. All of us are fully aware of the inevitability and all-embracing power of death. How does this knowledge help living humans who think about it?

Swamiji compared death to sleep and meditation. Both are temporary forms of ceasing to be; you come out of them more refreshed. So death is a passing phase. You come out of it in another form. Proof? Swamiji had none. His excuse was that it was "the highest knowledge" (an expression often used by divines when they don’t have the answers), a sort of spiritual classified document to which ordinary mortals like you and me have no access. Swamiji subscribes to the Hindu-Jain-Buddhist-Sikh belief of cycles of births and deaths. As evidence of previous births he cited examples of siblings who had the same genes but were different from each other. Why? Because of their karmas in previous lives. He repeated the assurance given to us by Upanishads and the Bhagavadgita: To one who is born death is certain; to one who dies, rebirth is certain. As a man casts off old clothes and takes on new, so when a person dies he takes birth in another form. Any proof of rebirth? None.

The Swamiji assured his audience that death was nothing to be frightened of: he cited examples of people who were clinically declared dead but revived to tell how pleasant an experience it was to pass from life to death. Psychiatrists have explained these near-death experiences as hallucinations of impaired minds.

Swamiji had great fun mocking Judeo-Christian-Muslim belief in the Day of Judgement, heaven and hell. Their paradise would be like living in a five-star hotel and sleeping in comfortable beds, lovely maidens to share them with, gourmet food and vintage wines. He got the laughter he expected.

Listening to his soothing voice was like drinking old wine poured out of old bottles. If he knows the truth about death, he did not reveal it. His "highest knowledge" remained his well-guarded secret.

Why do these holy men make assess of the gullible? Why don’t they admit that no one has yet solved the mystery of death, nor probably will? Although it is hard to believe that with the body goes whatever there is in it that makes him or her a distinct individual, if we are honest to ourselves we must admit, we do not know. Adi Shankara was candid enough to say that he did not know where we come from, why we are here and where we go after we die. Ghalib mocked the Islamic concept of heaven, saying he knew the truth about paradise but it was not too bad a notion to beguile the mind. The same applies to the notion of birth after death. We don’t have a clue about what lies beyond death so we make up fairy tales about life to come. As Omar Khayyam wrote:

There was a door to which I found no key
There was a veil beyond which I could not see;
Talk awhile of thee and me there was
Then no more of thee or me.

Art of doing nothing

Over the years of keeping a punishing schedule of work I lost the art of relaxing. When I have finished the day’s assignments I feel lost for having nothing to do. I fidget. I get down to solving cross-word puzzles. I pick up a book to read or ring up someone without any reason. Another fallout of maintaining a strict work schedule is I’ve become a stickler for punctuality. For others punctuality is a virtue; with me it has become a vice. If anyone is five minutes late in keeping his or her appointment, I start getting agitated. If an invited guest is not punctual, instead of welcoming him or her I am rude and ruin their appetite as well as mine. Even as a guest in other peoples’ homes, I can’t resist being unpleasant to other guests who do not turn up on time. Now few people invite me for a meal. I can’t blame them.

Ithought if I got rid of my wrist-watch and clocks in my home I would free myself from the tyranny of time. It did not work because over the years punctuality has become a fetish and I have created an inbuilt stop-watch which ticks away relentlessly. No matter what time I go to bed, it gives me a wake-up alarm call at 4.30 a.m. It does the same at mid-day and does not allow me to extend my siesta beyond an hour. It dictates my meal times and my sundowner: Scotch at the dot of 7 p.m., dinner at 8.15 p.m. I have begun to resent being dictated by myself to myself. I swore to make one desperate attempt to break the shackles of time which had made me its prisoner.

I took a week off in Kasauli, determined to do absolutely nothing. Ipromised myself I’d sit in my garden and watch the clouds roll by. I’d talk to the pine trees and flowering bushes. I’d take a stroll round the hill or in the bazaar just to say "Hello" to Panchi the chemist, Satto the paanwala, Pemba the Tibetan, Guptaji store-keeper or flirt with Lucy the fluffy snow-white spitz belonging to the Churamanis. My evenings would be spent listening to tapes of Mozart, Beethoven, Chopin, Amjad Ali Khan, Mehdi Hassan, Jagjit Singh, Farida Khannum and Darshan Singh. For a week I will be at the receiving end of sights and sounds of my sylvan resort.

I found reassurance in a small poem by E.V. Rieu who was for seven years (1912-19) manager of the Oxford University Press in Bombay. In a poem entitled What does it matter? he wrote:

What does it matter to you and me
Whether it is half-past eight or three?
The grandfather clock has just gone one;
And hark, the clock in the hall’s begun
But it must be wrong, for its striking seven;
And there goes another one, on to eleven
And I think it is four,
But it might be more
Oh, what does it matter to you and me?
Let’s have dinner and call it tea!
And we’ll go to bed and wake at three,
For the sun will be right in the morning.

Alas! The experiment failed miserably. Habits of a lifetime cannot be willed away in a week. True, my internal alarm clock did not wake me at 4.30, but at 6 a.m. This often happens in the still silence and fresh air of the mountains. But, thereafter, I read four papers end to end, solved four cross-word puzzles, read and scribbled all day long. Will anyone teach me how to relax, how to do absolutely nothing?

‘Brilliant’ reporter

A young reporter was sent to cover the annual play of the local high school.

His report described the excitement in the hall and concluded: "And the auditorium was filled with expectant mothers eagerly awaiting the off-springs."

* * *

Banta Singh challenged the stranger entering into his farmland. With an air of great importance the visitor produced his card and remarked: "I am a government inspector and am entitled to inspect your farm."

Sometime later Banta saw the inspector running for all he was worth to get away from a bull who was chasing him. Leaning over the fence Banta shouted: "Show him your card, mister — show him your card."

(Contributed by Shivtar Singh Dalla, Ludhiana)