Steps--MC, Watercolor on Paper
I had written this post many Mondays ago. It is a rumination over suicide.
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Suicide has been on my mind lately; not as in committing it, perhaps someday that too though, but for now it’s power.
In this context I have often thought about the following verse by Zauq (Sheikh Ibrahim Zauq: 1790—1854) who was famously Mirza Ghalib’s contemporary and nemesis.
लाई हयात आए क़ज़ा ले चली चले
अपनी ख़ुशी न आए न अपनी ख़ुशी चले
Life brought me here, death took me away
Came without my consent, without consent I went away
Zauq seems to rue the fact that he was born without his consent and would die without. I agree with the first part that he was born without his consent. I used to tell my mother Snehlata in all seriousness that she and my father Manharray should have stopped before I was born. When I first said it to her some three decades ago she was both deeply anguished as well as intrigued, the latter because she knew the philosophical bent of my mind. In later years she used be amused by it.
My point to her being that it was unnecessary for her to have conceived me because she already had three other children, which to me was two too many already.
Coming back to Zauq’s verse in the context of my rumination about suicide, he appears to have disregarded the fact that death could be induced. It is true that we are all born without our consent but we could easily choose to end it of our own volition. I am not an advocate of suicide generally but when it comes to self and that too at a philosophical, poetic level it is certainly worth talking about.
It is the ultimate power that one has oneself. Buddhists have used it as the ultimate form of protest through self-immolation which is obviously beyond comprehension for most people.
Suicide as a theme has also been rattling about in my mind because of the renewed debate within the scientific community whether the universe that we live in is a simulation of a more advanced civilization. I have written about this theme but for this morning suffice it to see it in the context of suicide. If everything is a simulation, including our every single behavior and action, frailty and strength, like and dislike, success and failure, then I suppose those choosing to end their lives can also be marked down under that column. Unless, of course, the simulator did not have account for that contingency. If that was not accounted for, then suicide is the way to breach that simulation.
I seriously doubt if a civilization or a simulator could think of such mindboggling complexities in its programming such as imposing the speed of light as the ultimate speed would not have thought about the contingency such as entities like us inhabiting the simulation self-destructing.
Something to think about on a Monday morning, I think.
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And how is that headline for clickbait?
