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 25th
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.
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.
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