DOES AGING HAVE A PURPOSE?

Crabby Old Man

What do you see nurses? ..What do you see?
What are you thinking.....when you're looking at me?
A crabby old man, ...not very wise,
Uncertain of habit ........with faraway eyes?

Who dribbles his food.......and makes no reply.
When you say in a loud voice.....'I do wish you'd try!
Who seems not to notice ...the things that you do.
And forever is losing .......... A sock or shoe?

Who, resisting or not...........lets you do as you will,
With bathing and feeding the long day to fill?
Is that what you're thinking?....Is that what you see?
Then open your eyes, nurse......you're not looking at me.

I'll tell you who I am ..... As I sit here so still,
As I do at your bidding, ......as I eat at your will.
I'm a small child of Ten.......with a father and mother,
Brothers and sisters .........who love one another

A young boy of Sixteen ... with wings on his feet
Dreaming that soon now........a lover he'll meet.
A groom soon at Twenty ...my heart gives a leap.
Remembering the vows......that I promised to keep.

At Twenty-Five, now .......... I have young of my own.
Who need me to guide .... And a secure happy home.
A man of Thirty ......... My young now grown fast,
Bound to each other ....... With ties that should last.

At Forty, my young sons ....have grown and are gone,
But my woman's beside me.......to see I don't mourn.
At Fifty, once more ..... Babies play 'round my knee,
Again, we know children ....... My loved one and me.

Dark days are upon me .... My wife is now dead.
I look at the future ..............I shudder with dread.
For my young are all rearing young of their own.
And I think of the years....... And the love that I've known.

I'm now an old man.........and nature is cruel.
Tis jest to make old age look like a fool.
The body, it crumbles..........grace and vigor, depart.
There is now a stone........where I once had a heart.

But inside this old carcass .. A young guy still dwells,
And now and again .......my battered heart swells
I remember the joys........... I remember the pain.
And I'm loving and living.............life over again.

I think of the years, all too few......gone too fast.
And accept the stark fact........that nothing can last.
So open your eyes, people ........open and see..
Not a crabby old man. Look closer....see........ME!!

( This poem was sent by a freind)



One of the best poems I ever read....We seem to look at old people a bit disapprovingly ...and we attribute a lot of cliched traits to them and mock their supposed idiocracies....how much ever we fight and treat old people and old age and treat them as some kind of enemies and ostracise people with certain ages from our routines of life....arent we fighting and disowning an enemy which we are going to be ?

But it begs the question now that why do we age and die at all? What is the purpose of aging? Why cant we live indefinitely? lets call for an answer by divine intervention first and then see where we arrive.

God sends our types here periodically and then recalls them. lets not ask why we were created in the first place. lets assume god couldnt help creating us i.e it was compulsory for god to create us for reasons only known to him. But maybe we can try and take potshots of guesses...like god may have such a hobby of crafting different living beings and collecting them......maybe god is trying to clone himself and rejections are being discarded on a place called earth , so it appears now that atleast one living being on earth bears a better resemblance to god than others( maybe hindus were right in revering cow as god...or maybe its the snake and the combodians were always correct) Maybe god enjoys a human fight and wagers, like we enjoy a good chicken fight, or maybe god wanted to write a Phd treatise called Sufferings, so he created us to see things in practical action. Whatever the divine reason, the fact is that we are here but then why do we go? maybe god is constantly transferring us to his various zoos ( maybe the UFOs are a reality) or god recalls living beings to get feedback on his Phd treatise.

Lets not now detain and disturb god further and then try to answer the same question again . why were we created?...The simple answer to that question is that we could not help creating ourselves. The conditions were such that we had to come. All of us in suitable installments... first the elements oxygen, carbon, hydrogen and phosphorus, which were ever present and are the building blocks of life. Then simple molecules like water arrived. The correct blend of the elements suspended in water with the correct temperature, and other fundamental catalysts added in this primordial soup simmering in a saucepan ( the earth acted like a giant saucepan with the ocean the basic stock for the soup) powered by sunrays lashing on this sauce pan for some billions of years got life ticking .Some time during this time, life got lucky and simple molecules turned to complex molecules...(now Darwins turn).then to unicellular beings...to small multicellular beings...to amoeba..to bacteria...fungus...to fish...to giraffe, man and tiger. Thats about how and the why of the creation

The second law of thermodynamics ensures the reason of all death. simplicistically the law says that entrophy increases i.e disorder increases until there is complete equilibrium of energies. (To my limited ability I find this to be the biggest paradox, I have ever encountered.) So to again put it simplistically, all living being bodies deteriorate and lose integrity ,and when enough integrity is lost they stop to be. thats about why and how we die, and this increase of entrophy in our direction is aging.

It is apparent that if living beings did not die then there would have been no place for anyone to live. This earth would be covered with trees and fungus and nothing would have evolved except perhaps monkeys who are adept at living on trees, and as we are close cousins to the simians it proves that we are quite a smart and wily lot.

But still suppose that there was no concept of death. The question of undeath runs in two directions. One is the undeath by non aging and the consequevces are identified above. But what about attrition of life? Suppose a road roller flattened a sleeping cat because the driver was drunk, then what happens to the cat? It is incomprehensible to venture that nothing would happen to the cat. That he roller would simply climb over the sleeping cat and the cat will maintain its feline integrity as it is deathless! This line of thinking will deny existence of force,pressure,mass,weight and gravity,and there will be no physics ! so this line of thinking is not teneable as the universe would not exist bereft of physics, leave alone the cat. So it is understood that the cat will be flattened. Now that the cat is flattened what happens next? The cat definetely is no more in the shape it is generally recognised as cat. Nor is that cat in exactly one peice but in atleast quite a few peices. How then can it not die? Well, it may be said that the peices will live. But what will sustain the peices? There is no metabolic system left to provide energy so how will the cells survive and regenerate as the cat is no octopus? The answer maybe that no energy is required to sustain the peices, and theres no need for the cells to regenerate. Then we are talking about some peices of stone and not a living cat. So again it is unteneable there can be no death because of attrition of life.

The undeath will have to count attrition of life out of its scope and if undeath due to non aging was the norm, then I would not be here to write this and you would not be here to read this blog. It is imperative that the old die so that our young might live.

God alas ,cannot use these arguements for imposition of death. I would simply counterargue that god can always at his will go on increasing the size of earth endlessly so that all can live without dying. Afterall isnt the universe infinite?

It is amply clear that there is no purpose to life apart from being born, living and dying. The presence of a short lived housefly amply proves the point as well as the presence of very long lived tortoise who simply sits for centuries and then dies. So it derives that there is no purpose to aging.As a housefly has no strategic purpose ,so does humans have no lofty purpose to be. Making way for the young too is not the purpose but the consequence of aging. By dying(though unwillingly) we will only be returning a favour which our forebears had granted to us.

But this should not be constructed as a confession of eternal doom and provides no licence to listlessness. We may be typical social animals with a zebra for company on this soceity earth and the purpose of life may only be a social invention, but that does not stop us from enjoying life as to our manufactured concepts of joy and nastiness. We, by being here, will use some of the time there ever will be, and share the same time too with others, whether organic or inorganic. There is no point in being intolerant and unconcerned towards others who have simply used some more time than we have done. Why kick and damage a door that we will have to enter?

COMPLETE DIVERSITY NOW FOR FUTURE UNITY

(DISCLAIMER: The reason for this blog peice is not muslim bashing. The reason is to make the reader introspect and plug holes. I say here that I carry no breif for any religion or any organisation. I further say that i am an atheist and totally commited to rational way of life.This blog peice is a socio-political commentary and not an opinion about religion.)

M J Akbar says today that Muslims want equality as a right which is gauranteed to them by the constitution.He also says that Do-gooders try to do good for Muslim community in a very condescending and patronising attitude which he finds abhorent. I agree with him on both counts. If someone requires help ,It may be given but care should be taken that the receiver does not loose his dignity.But isnt it incumbent on the help seeker to altleast strive to improve his lot before demanding help ?

If we strive to be a homogenous people of India aiming for perfect social equality ,The beginning will have to be made by the aggreived or the presumably aggreived. Here Muslims will have to make the beginning. They will have to understand that religion needs to be practiced in a personal space inside there homes. They will have to understand that religion is not a fashion statement which needs to be paraded on the streets.

What seems to be most jarring and the biggest impediment to trust, which is the most necessary precursor to a just and equal soceity, is the attitude of our Muslims who try to pass off as more of a muslim in India. While the islamic world is very slowly reforming , the Indian muslims are helping themselves with the baggage others are leaving behind. The Pan Islamic world is being slowly reformed at the ground level by new rulers who are the Progencies of the fading ruling class, who have the benefit of modern education .It greatly helps these new rulers that they do not have any opposition and rule autocratically, and in a free country like India, Muslims can manage to regress and go back to the so called roots by exercising their sovereign right to freedom!

Average indians forms opinions by observing things around him and television. Few Indians will philosophise, treatise and infer about the Muslim phyche, most will be coloured by the anecdotal fabric abounding. And what does an average indian see? The majority are woken in the morning by the azaan on the loudspeaker. As Muslims have survived and indeed flourished till the loudspeaker age, then the use of loudspeakers surely must not be necessary. Why irritate the majority of non beleivers in the morning and earn their illwill? A pious and practicing muslim will buy an alarm clock to get up in time for his prayers.

The Muslim behavior has changed a lot in the last few years. There are more muslims wearing short pyjamas and short trousers(!) with scull caps than ever before. Muslims are more forcefully asserting their identities by trying to dress medievally and grow beards. If this is due to religious injunction then nothing should be said about it, but it surely handicaps the process of assimalation. After all people instinctly lean and trust their own kind, and its true for all groups including the muslim community.

It also does not help the muslim cause that Islam is not a native religion of india. But what purpose is served by flogging this fact? Last eid I saw a procession where twelve men were riding horses dressed up as arabs! I am sure the riders were innocent muslims doing it for some kicks and must have treated the ride as a happy day out though a bumpy one, but surely the masterminds knew the repurcussions. What statements went out to all the non muslim watchers of this spectacle that day?
Howmuchever desirable it is that everyone practices their religion inside their houses and become Indians once out of their doors, It will not happen for atleast another 100 years. When every indian is educated in that time this utopia may be reached.

So what must be done in the while? So that there is least friction and everyone lives amicably?

Lets use the full power of our credo UNITY IN DIVERSITY. Uptill now it is only a mere slogan ,maybe we can give it some teeth. Muslims are wary that their identity will gradually be eroded and so they resort to unnessary obstentious show of symbols of their religion, which creates friction and brings religion on the roads, culminating in clashes of religion.

lets grant the Muslims whatever is required to practice their religion. Muslims are governed by their personal law at the moment. To say in somewhat other words , they have a personal civil code. Why not grant them their personal criminal code too!! That way they have best of both the worlds. They are free to practice their religion as it is practised in Saudi Arabia, but in the free and secular atmosphere of India. The majority Hindus would not mind as Hinduism was never a proselytysing religion and is never in jeopardy on a day to day basis.

But this act of ours will earn a lot of goodwill from our Muslim brethren . It will calm them and reassure them that their religious identity is not in peril. Maybe in another 100 years time when all are educated, pursuit of personal wellbeing and reckoning of the futility of rigid identities in the then global arena will dawn on them and they will realise and maybe able to laugh at today and then think perhaps that change was always the only constant.

A CASE FOR A COMMON RELIGION

All people exit from the womb and enter this world in a common fashion. The journey is almost identical to all of us, and the duration taken to make us us is reasonably the same for everyone ,everything else remaining constant. We have no awareness of self at the time of our birth and a few added years thereafter. The same is the case for all living beings on earth.

Some of the living creatures outgrow their non concious state, like us humans to a great extent and so become a thinking species. Some creatures like dogs develop only a limited ability for thinking , maybe even then its only a reflex action, and then some like a housefly, donot develop this ability at all maybe because of a very breif lifespan.

But what now seems to be apparent among the low thinkers or no thinkers is the absence of any religious idealogy among them, which again begets the obvious question. Wouldnt religion be programmed in our genes like breathing if it was a necessary precondition to living? Maybe we could have had different kinds of air to breath for different religions? The absence of thinking process it seems did not make some less capable of living. So the faculty of thinking which derives religion is apparently not contributing to the biological process of living. But as we are not trees but beings with a thinking habit in the major stage of our life, we have to habitually think. We fancy that we have a purpose in our life. I think religion couldnt help creating itself , what even if to cater to this thinking habit, so that people are shown the way to fulfill their supposed invaluable purpose of their lives.

If we go somewere else after dying, and the fact of death seems to be common for adherents of all organised religion whether they have properly fulfilled their purpose of life or not, what was the purpose for all of us to conjoin here and crowd this earth in the first place? wouldnt it be easier for people of different religions to have different planets for themselves and two sattelites each called heaven and hell reserved for them at all times so that each could fulfill his purpose of life.? that way there would be less people and property rates would not rise so much.

Does the pure basic function of living different for different religions? Or the fact of death different whatever different religion is followed?then what benefit is derived by adhering to different religion? Some may argue that as we are here anyway so lets make the best of it now and be religious, but which seems alas, a lazy persons idea of an exercise when he plays snakes and ladders

By following a religion they are actually choosing a quality of life. But generally people follow the religion they were born into and live through it like a chore. Ironically organised religion offers a set and rigid way of living life and thus presumably limiting the thinking faculty ,which makes living an assembly line job, impacting the very special quality of life they were looking for.

One may as well say why follow a religion and render yourself a slave to its ritualististic living parameters when one was always free to operate his living as he liked in the first place.

Maybe such a way of life should be called the common world religion which folds in itself all facets of the kinds of living and thus becomes one and whole and homogenous. i.e the world religion.