View from my window

Which is the most appropriate punctuation mark to put after the word Death? An exclamation mark, a full stop, a question mark or a comma? It is true that it can be any one of these for different people. It would depend on general belief. But invariably death is presented as something to be feared, something we are told would happen to us and yet we do not truly believe that it would. It is feared  for our near and dear ones and cursed on our enemies. We talk about the departed or terminally ill as people who need our sympathies. Our language about death is never positive, always sad, fearful, regretful. Places associated with death, burning pyres, cemeteries, funeral processions evoke terror and we avert our eyes. Why? Granted, it is an unknown land and all of our knowledge is based on information, and that too in metaphorical terms, mostly from scriptures but what makes us fear and dread death? All of us have to cross the threshold of death. The highest and the lowest have crosse...

Everything we see, hear, feel, perceive is an illusion, when I said these words aloud to myself I realized that this is not an original idea but in fact even when translated into other languages one sees this philosophy floating around. Which means that the idea is at least thought worthy. This illusion is interpreted and defined and having thus gone through this process becomes a reality-but it is a limited reality. When we come into the world and in our encounter with everything in the world there is nothing that came with a label e.g. when the first man came on Earth he did not find sticky notes on 'sun', 'water', 'soil', 'God', 'fire', 'cold', 'hot' etc. The story of illusions becoming realities is the story of development of language. Our journey through life is but a journey of naming what we perceive exists in this world and learning their labels. So an illusion becomes a reality, whether it is God or a grain of sand or a d...