Here's to LIFE

Twenty tiny, little kids were gunned down in Newtown, Connecticut a few days back smearing the sometime serene and peaceful atmosphere of Newtown with raw blood of innocent kids who probably were eagerly waiting for Santa Claus to give them gifts in the ensuing Christmas which was just a couple of weeks away. Their parents were probably planning on some merry and colorful Christmas celebrations with their beloved children, perhaps hoping for a clear sunny sky on December 25^th in between typical snowfalls that accompany this time of the year. Those parents instead had to bury the lifeless bodies of the tiny little kids, a grief so heavy that the earth should have sunk by now being unable to lift the weight. Santa Claus can no longer give them gifts, for they are now in their eternal sleep, six feet below the ground.

The world’s largest democracy with a 5000+ year old culture interestingly also boasts of a rape of a woman every 20 minutes, and that is just official record.  Girls (or kids) as young as 3 year old to women in sixties, the fairer sex just can’t escape the dread and agony of rape, interestingly in a culture which worships literally hundreds of goddesses in ‘mother’ God forms celebrating festivals every year with unprecedented pomp, colors and gaiety in honor of ‘mother’ goddesses, and then boasting of a shameless one rape per 20 min statistics. Gang-rape followed by piercing her genital organs by iron rod so as to result in doctors being forced to remove her intestines in order to save her – and that’s at the heart of New Delhi city, the capital of India. A rape so brutal to shake a billion people, and even within a few days of that indescribably heinous crime, at least 20 rapes have been reported by media across the country, some of them leading to death of the victims.

Even as the gun rights were being debated in America following the sanguinary Newtown massacre, two firefighters sacrificing their cozy sleep at 5:30 am in the morning of Christmas eve arrive to do their duty in a Pennsylvania locality only to be gunned down to death by a (?) person. It being the Christmas Eve, those duty-bound firefighters were most likely missing their good time with their family, missing an early morning sleep on one of the most awaited and colorful days of the year. The call of duty was strong for them to sacrifice the good times, and embraced an untimely and sad death.  

Be it a few women volunteering to administer polio vaccines to kids in Pakistan who were killed by Taliban militants to hundreds of innocent civilians being butchered every other day in the super volatile Syria, we live at a time and on a planet where ‘death’ is highly commonplace. The value of a human life which is ideally priceless and precious is being mocked at every day. When someone dies, one ceases to exist, forever. Nobody knows for sure if there’s afterlife, if ‘death’ is final or if there’s someone called ‘God’ who delivers justice on a final day. So, when one dies, it’s just over. That person’s just gone. Ironically, hundreds of such innocent people just cease to exist every day with an untimely death. The newspapers – print and online – are just filled with negative energy, negative news and negative spirit, of murders, rape, blasts, corruption, etc. Every day we are surrounded by news that create a negative atmosphere around us but who knows, we might ourselves be a part of that negative news someday when a trigger-happy lunatic pulls his gun randomly at us while walking on the street or while watching a movie in a theater. And then we cease to exist, and then candlelight vigils and public mourning will be held to remember us, the innocent victims. And the world will keep going after that as usual – there will still be snowfalls every winter in Columbus OH where I live, there will still be orange-yellow leaves on the trees every autumn around Ohio State university campus and Halley’s Comet will certainly visit us in 2062. Mankind will go on; the spirit of humans will keep on pushing its frontiers discovering new things never surrendering to failures and on a comic scale, stars will still be born and die after we are gone forever.

We should never take our ‘life’ for granted and never think that we have all the time in the world to fulfill some desires or wishes we have – to learn Italian someday, to walk in the fresh snow at sunrise, to read that book that’s lying on my desk for months, to call someone to say ‘I am sorry’ or to hug one’s loved ones tight. In a world where Google news feed brings news of ‘death’, murder, killings etc. every minute, life is absolutely uncertain. Since death is so commonplace rendering ‘life’ too transient and unpredictable, we might as well surround ourselves with some positive and bright atmosphere while we possess that thing called ‘life’. Or at least we should try to. The little time while we keep borrowing oxygen from the atmosphere to breathe, we should rather wrap ourselves with optimistic and positive vibes, trying to see ‘happiness’ and a meaning of ‘life’ in every small thing, no matter how trivial. This doesn’t and can’t invalidate the sheer unpredictability and transience of ‘life’, but sure it does give a ‘life’ worth living irrespective of anything else.

Waking up unexpectedly to a fresh but heavy shower of snow in the morning is an amazing experience, especially when that’s the first big snow shower of that winter. And the flakes hit softly on your face as you walk. More amazing is the experience of putting your footsteps on a trail of snow early morning before anyone else has put! You can look back and see your footprints behind, the only footprints behind! The branches of the trees gently supporting an inch of snow provide an exotic and breathtaking view. And when you sink your foot deep inside 7 inches of snow breaking the pristine surface, that experience is just so fun!

Or celebrating one’s adviser’s birthday with a small but sudden and unplanned cake-cutting event @ the lab can be apparently a trivial but memorable event especially when you suddenly know you have to get the cake in 10 minutes time from anywhere in the world or he leaves for airport and then you literally run with another colleague to any damn place that sells cakes! 

And that simple-looking cup of black coffee is no doubt the best yet I’ve ever had, a coffee connoisseur’s delight! A place called ‘One Line Coffee’ in downtown Columbus where each cup is hand brewed after placing the order, using some weird but interesting brewing procedure, a coffee whose taste easily outperforms any of the hundreds of tastes of coffee I’ve had (having exhausted almost all flavors of Starbucks, Carribou, etc etc.). And making me aware of this place’s existence was one of the many good things which my adviser has done to me in the last 4+ years. Starbucks’ caffe Latte no doubt has an unbeatably appealing visual appeal (its taste is good too no doubt!). Sitting lazily for hours on one of the comforting sofas of Starbucks with a coffee in your hand and lazily chatting with a couple of other buddies around is just a heavenly experience.

Arrive at the Easton Mall one pre-Christmas night to watch iMax 3D show of ‘The Hobbit’ with what turned out to be a disappointingly small screen, and discover that the entire place is so glittering with Christmas decorations! That totally unexpected rendezvous with such a colorful ambience is so captivating! And when you see someone taking a ride in a horse-cart on the streets amid those colors, it’s just gets better from being too good already.

Here’s to ‘life’ in general - unpredictable, uncertain and transient life, but happy, optimistic, colorful and sweet life with a happiness-seeking spirit that refuses to die.