From & To Sathish #6 - Page 17

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Avan, Aval Adhu 481

Death is a two-faced entity. One face is that of God and the other face is that of the Devil itself. Death is the end and is also the beginning. Death is a cycle in which Mother Nature reprocesses you into something else. Living and animate or inanimate but still useful to the living. Even in death, our bodies serve as food to insects, animals, worms, and bacteria.

Death is both kind and unkind. Kind to the one who is ready to depart and unkind to the one who is not ready to go on another new voyage when the current one remains unfinished.

Death is cruel, gruesome, and painful, and at the same time kind, gentle and forgiving in its various avatars.

What can be more painful and cruel than to see a baby born dead? If that was not cruel enough, think how heartbreaking and unbearable to see a baby born with cancer and then spend weeks and months crying in pain before succumbing to the disease. Death was cruel and brutal in its attack when it came to a young girl Nirbhaya who was gangraped, mutilated, and then thrown out of a moving bus.

What can you and I do but cry or scream in pain when we see the death of a loved one or whimper like a child when you know the breath that you took was the last one?

We humans are not made up of that essence that great souls are made of like that saint or pure one who looked up to his father in the skies and whispered, ' Forgive them Father for they know not what they do.'

' Meenakshi, Meena ' Ravi roared loudly like a wounded lion and the sounds of his pain and anger rippled and traveled long and deep into the forest.

' I am sorry. I am sorry for hurting you, Meena. I love you so much. I would have willingly sacrificed my life for you. But you gave me no choice.'

Azhagan stood watching Ravi with his eyes full of tears and sadly recollected how his blind mother had been murdered 800 years ago and wiping his eyes tried to comfort Ravi.

' Master, you had no choice but she did. Meenakshi had many chances to repent and change for the better. But she did not.'

Ravi yelled, ' Yes, she did not and the reason for that was my arrogance and my silly and stupid obstinate nature. I should have realized that this would happen in the end and I should have surrendered to her wishes.'

' No, master. That would not have worked out for both of you would have been miserable and in the end, both of you would have ended up hating each other.'

Ravi sobbed like a little child, ' At least she would have been alive ' and looked up at Spartan and yelled, ' You could have spared her by injuring her slightly or maybe you could have scared her in some way. Why did you have to kill her, Spartan? Who gave you the right to take another person's life?'

Spartan ( Azhagan) smiled grimly and pointed into the darkness with his right arm, ' I did not kill her, Master. They killed her.'

The full moon was unusually brighter than normal and both Malar and Madhu looked up at the dead moon that only reflected its parent star's light and wondered if it was trying to shine, reflect more light on the forest of Perumalvaram to aid Ravi and them to see better.

Ravi straining his eyes caught sight of two bodies lying on the grass and realizing that they were wearing sarees yelled in panic, ' Women. Two women ' and turning to Azhagan asked in a shocked voice, ' Spartan, those are women. Are they dead? Have you killed them?'

' No. No. No to all your questions, my friend ' and bringing his two hands, made a loud clapping noise and said something, and instantly Light engulfed them and drowned them all in its brightness.

Placing a gentle kiss on Meenakshi's forehead, he whispered, ' Meena, I will be back in a few seconds. I am not going anywhere ' and gently placing her dead body on the ground, stood up and walked about ten feet towards the two women who lay inert on the forest floor and froze in fear and shock and yelled, ' Meenakshi! Meena ' and looked at Azhagan and screamed, ' What is the meaning of this? What is going on here? They both look like Meenakshi. Are they her sisters? How is this possible? I would have known about it by now if Meena had been born with two other identical sisters?'

Spartan gently patted Ravi's shoulder and said, ' They are not Meenakshi's sisters but things which were created to look like her'.

' You mean Cloning. Are these two women Meena's clones?'

' No, master. They are imitations and certainly not real. They are nothing like you or others of your human species.

Both his head and heart were choking in grief and all Ravi could do was choke up a question, ' Then what are they, Spartan?'

The boy who went into the dark and came back with light.

How to redesign your life

By Shoba Narayan, Wisdom Circle, 3 October 2023

In 2018, the Stanford Center on Longevity launched an initiative called The New Map of Life. The headline for the initiative simply read:

“The 100-year-life is here, and we are not ready.”

What does this mean? Simply put, barring unforeseen circumstances, we all can expect to live longer than our parents or grandparents. But are we designing lives for longevity? I am not sure. But we need to think about this.

For our parents and grandparents, life was linear. You were a student, then a householder and worker, then you retired. Today, things are a little more complicated. People pivot mid-career to something quite different. Entrepreneurs take the plunge at 50. Students take a year off and sometimes drop out of college altogether. Women (and some men) take time off to raise kids and then come back into the workforce. People decide to be gig workers rather than employees. This zig-zagging is both frightening and freeing.

Say you are 54 and you are reading this essay. Okay, you think, let me redesign my life to adjust for the fact that I may live longer. What would you do? Would you buy that Lamborghini that you have been dreaming about with the money that you have put away for medical emergencies? Before you say, of course not, just think for a minute. You are only 54. If science is to be believed, and barring medical misfortunes, you have a good 20 years of productive life ahead of you. Isn’t that enough to replenish your savings? Isn’t it time to live your dream?

As you can tell by now, the old linear and rigid models of going through life may be turned on their head. In the past, we were told to slow down at 55 and retire at 65. This is no longer necessary. Instead, you can continue to incorporate work, pleasure, family, education and enterprise into your lives till you are 75—at least. How to do this?

One thing that seems to be obvious is a nimble mindset that learns and -- equally important – unlearns -- as you age. Let me make this personal.

For me, as a writer in my fifties, I have a choice right now: I can learn and engage with Chat GPT or not. I can engage with AI (Artificial Intelligence) or not. I can learn about new forms of content creation that include interactive personalized videos that play well on Tik Tok and Instagram -- or not.

Now, I don’t consider myself a tech novice. I have learned to maintain my own website and love apps. But it still scares me to go down the road of Chat GPT because it means unlearning everything I thought I knew about writing. It means learning to engage with an algorithm and improve on it. But if I want to stay nimble, I have to do it. I have to do those things that frighten me. I have to learn to do things that I did in the beginning of my career even though I think of myself as a “senior” journalist. I have to pitch editors on topics that I know little about— bitcoin, AI, block chain and NFTs because, guess what, that’s where the money is? Adapting to new fields is happening at warp speed in every profession, be it finance, medicine or journalism. We all have to keep up or run the danger of being left behind.

A good way to keep up is to start something new, be it a business or a product. A start-up forces you to cultivate the beginner’s mindset. Today, more folks are pivoting to second careers or start-ups in their forties and fifties. The rationale is that they will still get a good ten to fifteen years to grow the business. As a woman, I have been thinking a lot about this. Common wisdom says that you need to start new things in your twenties and thirties. But for women who elect to raise children, this paradigm could flip. You could ramp up your career after your kids are in high-school, when you are in your forties or fifties. My kids are not home now. I have the time and the energy to go full-steam ahead, take on multiple projects or even start something new. This too is liberating, and it must be said, a little scary.

Age and maturity have certain strong benefits though. A number of studies have talked about the U-bend of happiness, suggesting that we are unhappiest when we are middle-aged and that happiness increases as we age. Scientists give a lot of reasons for this. As we age, we face our mortality and adjust our expectations of what we expect from not just life but also from ourselves. We take stock and realise that we cannot be that hip millionaire rock-musician with perfect lives and kids. The ups and downs that we have surfed and endured teaches us humility, gives us perspective. Even ideas of what happiness is changes as we age. In an interview, Dr. Laura Carstensen, director of the Stanford Center on Longevity says that happiness in older adults is nuanced. “They are more likely to experience joy with a tear in the eye than younger people are. We see a kind of savoring and an appreciation, that’s what captures the emotional experience. It is not a uniform, simplistic, happy.”

As we age, we are often asked to give advice to young adults starting their careers, and there are many things that we say about spending, saving, and forming relationships. But here is one mind-boggling fact. The way we humans are ageing, you may well be a young adult if you are in your forties. And 60 to quote the old cliché is the quite literally, the new 30.

Your best years are ahead of you. The question is: what are you going to do about it?

Hi all,

Okay! I admit that I am a diehard fan of Ilayaraja. No, that does not mean that I don't listen to other composer's music That also does not mean that I hate other music composers for that would be not termed borderline fanaticism but a full-blown case of rabies of the mind.

What I mean to say is that if God should suddenly appear and say, "Okay, Satish. Your time is up, let's go. Take only what is essential to you and you have three choices".

My first choice would be to take all the pain away in this world with me.

The second choice would be to take all evil things that exist in this world with me.

The third and final choice of mine would be to take all of Ilayaraja's compositions with me.

I know my thoughts are a bit dramatic and konjam cringe but then you know that I am only dreaming out my imaginations loud and in language. Of course, I know God is not going to pop up in front of me and grant my wishes.

Enough of illusions and confessions of my vivid brain that is suffering from an early onset of Dementia.

I am certain that music was my only companion other than my mother when I was born and also for the next few years and my only companion after the first two years. The reason for that was that my late dad constantly left behind Buns in my mum's oven. Poor soul, at least she is in a better place now.

I bet most of the music that entered my two or three-year-old head were of Tamil and Hindi origins. Well, that is no big surprise, for even though I was born in Bangalore to a Telugu family, I was born in a house that was surrounded by several Tamil families in a common courtyard and in the gully where I grew up during my first five years on this planet. Top that with my Dad's fanatic nay manic love for all things that had origins in Hindi films.

1972 to 1980 were full of music and a lot of it was from mainstream English Pop that was popular in those days. Boney m, beatles, Abba, Osibisa etc. However, I remained faithful to my early companions namely Hindi and Tamil music from the late 50s, 60s, and 70s. Then one night I heard " En vaanile " song from Johnny a film by Balu Mahendra and then and from right there, I began my journey with the Maestro.

I don't know even the basic rudiments of music and how it is structured and layered as it is composed. But I know what my heart and my soul respond to and to which well and spring it returns again and again to drink deep and sigh in ecstasy.

I often look up at the skies and thank God for blessing me with Physical ears and mental ears and for granting me the time to savor the music of my favorite composer.

My early ears and my formative years were full of Ilayaraja's music and it remains the same now in my twilight years.

I am fully locked and loaded and have very nearly battened down the hatches for the remaining part of the journey. I have all the music and books that I will ever need.

Thank you, Maestro. God bless you.

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