Had planned to write my third and final instalment on 'The Argumentative Indian", but reading has taken a back-seat to driving to work, as it were. I had thought of a lot to say about Sen's views on the Indian N-bomb, but I've forgotten most of it and will have to go through that chapter again.

Read a few blogs the other day. Neha politely informed me that the way to get people reading my blog was to read and follow other's posts. Saw that Jyoti had a blog and went through it. She hasn't been quite active on it lately, though I'm one to say! Went through Lisa Ray's entries too and read about her struggle with Multiple Myeloma. How her marrow transplant felt like and how she fought to maintain a positive outlook towards life. In one of her latest entries from Rishikesh, she talks about how she longs to live and enjoy life longer! Now that's a sentence I get to hear from so many people, but it's so poignant when I hear it from a person about to die, who's sure to die. I saw it in my brother-in-law as he was diagnosed with a particularly malignant tumour and tried to combat it briefly, before it took his life this March. Even though my wife and I never told him just how bad the situation was (and it was bad, with brain metastasis and multiple lesions in the lung), and for a brief period when he was responding to the chemotherapy and radiotherapy he believed us, he knew his end was near. It was pitiful to see him wishing for a few more years of life so he could better provide for his wife and son who he was leaving destitute, or almost so. I knew that he had scant months to live. That every day was a miracle, the way the tumour was pressing on the vital centres of the brain. It was sad to see him begging for life and knowing that there was nothing that could be done for him. We weren't very close so it wasn't a specific response but a more general one but I could see how very unfortunate it was.

I wonder how it would be to die young. When I look at the future, I think of all I have planned for it, a house, another car, a den for myself which would be my personal retreat, growing older and retiring, and finally enjoying the life I have worked hard to achieve. What if I were to die tomorrow? Or if I got to know that I had an incurable disease and would die soon? How would I react? A part of me, the tired, jaded part of me says I would take the news resignedly. What have I to live for anyway? I'm not doing anything so momentous that my dying would take away something from a great deal of people. Then I start wondering what that last moment would be like. Lying on my death bed, waiting for the last breath to leave my body, wondering how my consciousness would fade… would my hearing go first or my vision? Would I be blind and deaf, or would I hallucinate about events long past? Would I feel the pain of leaving behind my loved ones or would my brain be too out of order to do that? What would my last thought be and how would it fade? Slowly merging into oblivion or suddenly ceasing in mid-flow?