Topic: Death and dying
Easy 
On August 18, 2002, my life took a fateful turn. A persistent leg-pain was diagnosed as being caused by malignant terminal breast cancer that had spread all over my body.
Till then my life had been more or less similar to that of most Indian Hindu housewives. I was born and brought up in Maharashtra, a province in Western India, in a cultured and pious family and had married a respectable school...
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After I missed my last column, a memo from our hard-boiled editor slithered off my fax machine. “Near-death is a valid excuse for not writing,” he conceded grudgingly. “But since you’ve survived, you might as well write.”
I didn’t find out I had been near death until my fourth day in the hospital. With a BTG deadline approaching and a load of GBC assignments on hold, I had begun pestering my...
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According to “The Lost Art of Dying,” an article in the Sunday Telegraph of London, people nowadays are trying to avoid the thought of death. One proof of this is that the dying are no longer cared for at home. Whereas a century ago only five percent of the British population died in a hospital, today more than seventy percent do. And the more people seek to keep death at arm’s length, the more...
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No one likes to be the bearer of bad news. Not only is it unpleasant; it can be dangerous. Kings routinely used to kill on the spot hapless messengers bringing word of defeat.
Even so, most people still acknowledge that truth, however unpalatable, is preferable to illusion, however cheering. This is, after all, only practical, for the facts as they affect us have a certain implacable...
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While recently watching the evening news, I saw that almost the entire show was about killing and death: a murder, a rash of drug poisonings, a massacre of refugees by military forces, and a sampling of wars and preparations for war. For a kind of relief, the half-hour report ended with sports coverage. Yet even the world of games mourned: the news gave a two-minute homage to a former baseball...
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The poet’s vision is “to see infinity in a grain of sand and eternity in an hour.” In much the same way, a person who ponders Lord Krishna’s words in Bhagavad-gita can see the Transcendence even in the daily affairs of this material world.
Case in point: a recent article reported that each year, 20 million Americans suffer sports injuries. It seems a large percentage of these mishaps occur to...