WHAT IS YOUR DYING WISH?

WHAT IS YOUR LAST WISH?

Osho had devised a special, macabre and dramatic ceremony to help the truly dedicated sanyasi to learn the greatest lesson of life. The ceremony involved the man being taken to the cremation ground in the dead of night in a silent procession on a stretcher with a white sheet and flowers placed over him. At the cremation site he would be placed on a funeral pyre and amidst the chanting of select slokas, sandalwood would be placed on the man and a fire lit. Just when the fire was to engulf the by now utterly scared man, he would be rescued by Osho.

WHAT IS YOUR LAST WISH?

This ceremony may have its origins in the Katha Upanishad where Nachiketa learns from Yama the god of death that in order to understand life one ought to learn about death—an example of paradoxical thinking that I am a votary of.

Is it not a paradox that many of us learn to live only when we have little time left on this earth? Our most important desires surface at the time of death while our lives are lost in the pursuit of ephemeral things.

Late lamented music director Naushad narrates a touching episode.

It seems a man was condemned to the gallows. Moments before he was to be hanged he was asked if he had a last wish, as is customary. Did he want to eat or drink something he liked , meet someone close etc. To the surprise of the prison officials he said that his last wish was to listen to what he felt was the most moving, most touching song he ever heard. The song was DUNIYA KE RAKHWALE from the film Baiju Bawra .Perhaps the words from the song JEEVAN APNA WAPAS LELE, JEEVAN DENE WALE resonated with him at the last moments of his life. A tape recorder was obtained and the song played.

On another occasion legendary director Mehboob Khan was lying critically ill in a U. S hospital. Suspecting that his end was not far, he expressed what in fact was a last wish-- that Lata Mangeshkar sing on the long distance phone his favourite song RASIK BALMA from the film CHORI CHORI. Lata duly obliged, evening after evening, till Khan breathed his last.

A friend of mine and his family were trapped in the Taj Hotel , Mumbai when Kasab and his deadly gang of terrorists struck.[26/11] This friend and his family came within inches of being mowed by AK 47 ‘s as Kasab and his marauders ran past the room in which they were hiding. As these people held their breaths in total silence the terrorists assumed that the room was empty and ran towards the other parts of the corridor where they carried out their ghastly plan. Eventually after about 2 days the people were rescued. It took my friend about a week to recover after which he emailed to many us that in the face of death he and his family had learnt the greatest lesson of life—that it is futile to chase money, status, power etc and what was really important was the company and love of one’s family and friends. ’Nothing is more important than that’ he wrote.

What is significant in all this is that as we near our end we come to terms with what is truly significant and which we failed to realise when we had the time.

What is even more interesting for a person like me who has made cognitive psychology my all consuming passion[apart from music] is this—we know these things at a certain level and in fact such lessons have been handed over to us from the dawn of civilization. Yet each of us –or most of us—live our lives as if these are lessons for the birds.

Paradoxically the birds seem to know what is truly significant in their lives. A nightingale will sing till it dies…….

K.R.RAVI

WWW.KRRAVI.COM