navjeevan

 

Of obligations and inhibitions:

“Life is busy. There are daily obligations that have to be met. Take time to think about how precious and special human life is – you only get one such life. You can’t get it back.” – Rush Limbaugh

I found this good-to-read but hard-to-be-followed quote in a leading daily on the very next day of sudden demise of a boy in my neighborhood. People like me who had barely known him or even the ones who were closely related to him might call his passing away as ‘sudden’ but ‘his’ take on taking away his life would have to be heard to know if it really was a sudden incident or if such a thought had been hovering over his mind for long.

Unfortunately, we do not yet possess mechanisms to contact someone who has finally decided to leave this world behind and begin a new life – a life which would be free from materialism and criticism. Human life is certainly special for it has evolved from the times when humans lived without any clothes to the ones when we (have to) wear clothes of obligations, and it indeed is precious for we attach such a high value to the skin-deep aspects of our lives that even the soul gets captivated in a body of inhibitions.

Of discussions and lamentations:

The sad news spread out at its natural pace. I was caught unaware of the incident when asked by someone of any casualty that has taken place in one of the boys hostels. And, I didn’t get to hear any more of it unless I overheard a group of boys, munching on samosas and holding tea-cups in their hands, discussing on ‘how’ and ‘when’ people got to know of the ‘suicide‘.

There were different reporting manners and newer facts each time someone uttered a word about the ill-fated happening. The corridor talks sounded worrisome and were filled with all the old theories about the suicidal deaths. We cared for a while but it was overpowered by the numbness of our own judgements.

A condolence was offered to the family of the demised on the next morning and by this time, most of us had already moved on and ahead, carrying heavily filled individualistic bags of our obligations in one hand and inhibitions in the other one. Come a hot evening – marking the arrival of a devilish summer, newer arguments on the same ‘hot‘ topic are put forward along with hot cups of tea. The person who had made the last decision of his disturbed life is held responsible for disturbing the lives which were related to his. We make him a part of our coffee table discussions after praying for his soul to rest in peace (only) in our lamentations.

Of games and ethics:

We study zero-sum games where the total pay-offs of opponents yield no result but it is not possible to calculate the pay-offs when the opponents are  body and soul; and the value of the game cannot be defined when we have made our life a game in itself.

We make a fool of ourselves when we try to find a saddle point of a strictly indeterminable life and when we fail to do so, we choose to call it unfair. We will never be in a position to perform ethical analysis on the life and death of another person as the ethics are abstract and subjective – people understand these in blurred lines of their own vision.

But if we lay a hypothesis that a person who has supposedly performed an unethical act of snatching away his own life had considered the five-step ethical analysis process, we may reach a conclusion that the steps of identifying the higher order values, the stakeholders and the consequences of available options would have helped in saving a life which has lost the finale of a well-played tourney of games and which has (yet again) become an unsolvable puzzle, adding an invisible moral dimension to our problem of ethics.

This death has taken away with it – all the elements of old life, and has lifted the veil off the face of a new life:

a new life of obligations and inhibitions;

a new life of discussions and lamentations;

a new life of games and ethics.