********************************************************************************************************************
A couple of days back the couple of newspapers in Hyderabad that I take celebrated the World Suicide Day by printing stats and unasked-for advises.
This "World Suicide Day" is like our "Crime Branch of Police" in that they don't encourage suicide and crime but try and prevent them...unsuccessfully.
Well, I am sort of an unrecognized authority on suicide...I had a couple of mild attacks of the disease. But mild suicide is like mild pregnancy...they don't exist...you either help death or birth...no shortcuts there.
I have always wondered at our life-wish (rather than our death-wish of which our Jungs and Freuds gloat).
Frankly I was not consulted about my birth and perhaps not about my death either. They just happen to happen eventfully or not.
But we do wish to live...don't we?
I am reminded of the story told me by my grannie (who lived to a hundred) of the dame who said she would renounce the world and go to Kashi to die there peacefully as soon as she gets her son married...Kashi being the gateway to heaven:
By the way, here is the relevant shlok:
meaning:
are the surest ways to go to heaven (in case you want to, unlike Mark Twain's Huck).
Anyway this lady of whom my grannie was speaking postponed her non-refundable Kashi trip for a couple of years since she badly wanted to see her grandson set to arrive soon. And again, till her grandson got married and settled down. And then her great-grandson...you get the drift ok, no?...she died in her remote village at a round hundred (like my own grannie who had no such illusions).
My grannie was widowed at 25 and lived till her death (at 100) with her eldest son who himself got widowed at 40.
And I was living with them for my pre-university year.
And my fond grannie who had lost all her teeth long long ago was too very fond of roasted cashew nuts (unlike the equally toothless me now). So she used to take a few cashew nuts on the sly and grind them in her stone-mixie and mix the powder in her milk and drink it up and say:
"Ha!"
with a glowing light in her eyes and gulping sound in her throat and lilting glow in her heart.
I was away when she died but my mom (92+ now) who was a witness to the blessed event told me that when everyone gathered round her on her floor she asked for a slate and slate-pencil and wrote (since her throat was choked, not with agony, but phlegm) this message to her resident doctor:
"How many minutes more?"
And as the doc was blushing profusely at her phlegm, she breathed her last in fifteen minutes...give or take five...
...Posted by Ishani
**********************************************************************************************************************
Sunday, March 1, 2009
A couple of days back the couple of newspapers in Hyderabad that I take celebrated the World Suicide Day by printing stats and unasked-for advises.
This "World Suicide Day" is like our "Crime Branch of Police" in that they don't encourage suicide and crime but try and prevent them...unsuccessfully.
Well, I am sort of an unrecognized authority on suicide...I had a couple of mild attacks of the disease. But mild suicide is like mild pregnancy...they don't exist...you either help death or birth...no shortcuts there.
I have always wondered at our life-wish (rather than our death-wish of which our Jungs and Freuds gloat).
Frankly I was not consulted about my birth and perhaps not about my death either. They just happen to happen eventfully or not.
But we do wish to live...don't we?
I am reminded of the story told me by my grannie (who lived to a hundred) of the dame who said she would renounce the world and go to Kashi to die there peacefully as soon as she gets her son married...Kashi being the gateway to heaven:
By the way, here is the relevant shlok:
Darshanad Abhrasadashi
Jananat Kamalalye
Kashyantu maranan mukti:
Smaranad Arunachale
meaning:
Seeing Abhrasadashi (Chidambaram...not our ex-FM though ;)
Birthing in Kamalalyam (Tiruvarur)
Dying in Kashi (Benares)
And just thinking of Arunachalam (Tiruvannamalai)
are the surest ways to go to heaven (in case you want to, unlike Mark Twain's Huck).
Anyway this lady of whom my grannie was speaking postponed her non-refundable Kashi trip for a couple of years since she badly wanted to see her grandson set to arrive soon. And again, till her grandson got married and settled down. And then her great-grandson...you get the drift ok, no?...she died in her remote village at a round hundred (like my own grannie who had no such illusions).
My grannie was widowed at 25 and lived till her death (at 100) with her eldest son who himself got widowed at 40.
And I was living with them for my pre-university year.
And my fond grannie who had lost all her teeth long long ago was too very fond of roasted cashew nuts (unlike the equally toothless me now). So she used to take a few cashew nuts on the sly and grind them in her stone-mixie and mix the powder in her milk and drink it up and say:
"Ha!"
with a glowing light in her eyes and gulping sound in her throat and lilting glow in her heart.
I was away when she died but my mom (92+ now) who was a witness to the blessed event told me that when everyone gathered round her on her floor she asked for a slate and slate-pencil and wrote (since her throat was choked, not with agony, but phlegm) this message to her resident doctor:
"How many minutes more?"
And as the doc was blushing profusely at her phlegm, she breathed her last in fifteen minutes...give or take five...
...Posted by Ishani
**********************************************************************************************************************
No comments:
Post a Comment