Love, Life & Happiness

They say death is a great equalizer. The oppressor, the oppressed, the rich and the poor, the privileged and the deprived, the atheist and the fanatic, the prince and the pauper are all equal in death. They lie. They are wrong. All people are not equal in death. Death is as unequal as is life and as monstrously cruel. How we are treated in death is defined by the people we leave behind. We are quite helpless in our posthumous passivity. It is also defined by how we have lived. If we have mattered to people as name and person or only as number. What is our identity in death, numerical reality or philosophical rallying point? Many things define where we find ourselves when the cruel chariot of death has run over the fragrant floral lives and the dust settles down, giving way to the stench of dead body. From a very philosophical value, each life matters a universe in value, from a very cynical, realistic and analytic value, the quantum of loss out of any death will be defined

Nationalism is a fragile idea, which as the Roman Emperor, the philosopher-kind would allude to, in his dying day, when he asks his General Maximus, “ What is Rome? ” and then answers himself, explaining that, “ One can only whisper her name, anything more than a whisper, and it will fade away. ” Nation is a delicate thing, therein lies its strength. It joins the patches of varied lands, groups of varied people. Intellectuals have tried defining it in earnest. Some have succeeded. Some were really intellectuals, who searched for truth. Others were pretending to be intellectuals, their intent, to use it as a tool to propagate their idea. Their wish to propagate their own ideas was not driven as much by their conviction with truth being on their side, rather on their own interests. Truth is not the stagnant water of a muddy pond. Truth is the running river. A running river is certain of its existence but changes in its form. True intellect will always search for the truth. We

Rating : If you are a writer, Must read. If you are not- Still, a must read. I have just finished reading Middlemarch . It is quite a heavy and voluminous book. The story slowly rises, very slowly, spread across so many deeply developed and intricately engaging characters- the people of a fictional rustic town of Middlemarch in the 18 th Century England. The narrative and the story is strong, well-built with huge shoulders to carry various causes which it alludes to. The beauty and charm of reading a classic of those times is that while these stories were written when Europe convalesced under the forces which were to set it on a path to glory; it is to the credit to wonderful writers like George Eliot (Real name, Mary Ann Evans (1819-1880)), that they never allow the narrative to surrender to their causes. While the story deals with love, marriage as prime theme, it is not a romance novel, as is evident by the male pen-name taken by the writer in those times. Ther