Living On The Edge

This is not the first time that I have encountered ideas about something best described as inevitability. But events of late and a documentary I recently watched made me realise that even though inevitability is far grander and far closer than I thought, that it is both general and intensely personal, there exists an equally strong foe that counters and overcomes it completely.

Interest in technology, science, history and engineering has always, from a very young age, made me aware of the destructive power that the weapons of late twentieth century have bestowed upon man. And I realised later that this power does not rest in the hands of the best of men, but in most cases, in the hands of politicians, demagogues, deluded autocrats and weak wavering democrats. Momentous is the realisation that a small glitch, an incorrect reading or result of a computer system, and a weak and panicking mind in charge of acting may combine anywhere in the world even today to deliver that first irrevocable blow that will unleash a nuclear armageddon upon the world. I draw inspiration from the events of September 1983 in a missile command centre in USSR. If man's reliance on computers and machines was high then, and if the urge to believe the pronouncements of a machine was strong then, our reliance on them is deep-rooted and all pervasive today and our belief almost absolute!

Should a similar event happen today, it is inconceivable to imagine that a man in charge would decide to ignore and distrust the indications of a computer. And so what will take to light that irrevocable fuse of doom could very well be a small glitch in some system somewhere.
It's scary that not even super powers are safe from super hacks and super viruses! Its ominous and it is so very in-our-face. It' written all over the wall.

And then, other events in the recent past have made me change my beliefs about death. Death is no longer the notion we learned when we were children; that one is born, and then grows up and then grows old and dies. One gets tired and disease ridden and then the end comes. Death has become so much more commonplace!

Accidents are accidents and snuff out lives without regard to youth and childhood, but natural death has of late become more surreptitious, more unpredictable, in all more gruesome. A sneaky little fellow! It now fells young men and women with as much flourish as it would the old; there is the omnipresent weapon called cancer, the emperor of maladies, which strikes anywhere; and then of late there is the cardiac arrest!

When I was growing up, I remember it used to be known as the heart attack. It was supposed to attack only the reasonably aged and that too in mostly three instalments. Even cinema agreed that the third was the fatal one. But no more! It strikes anyone now, of any age, twenties, thirties, forties. And it does not give a second chance.
I have heard of so many contemporaries fall to this menace, all abruptly snuffed out, without much warning.

And so today I realise, inevitability is no longer the blurry figure at the horizon, it is actually woven into our lives and breaths. We don't really know if the breath that we just took would be our last. And we don't really know if the world that we know and live in and the world we have created around us and for us, will last into the next minute.
The how do we carry on with this business of living?

Is it just that inevitability was always lurking and has become more inevitable and more personal now? Perhaps yes.

Yes, what you have is a slate upon which you create your life and your love and your life's work. And yes, it will all be wiped clean one day, maybe just your slate, maybe all the slates of all the people on this earth. But then, go create something so beautiful , so powerful and so memorable that even as the creator wipes out the slate clean, he lets out a sigh of regret!

So even though the breath you draw now may be the last one you will ever draw; even though the life you always had may be changing this very moment; even though the world may dissolve into a stone age or worse into oblivion any moment and all you have ever lived for becomes dust and forgotten, go on my fellow inhabitants of this human legacy, live out your life the way you will, live for those that you will, live for what you will, live for making a mark and to be remembered till the time the world lasts!


For isn't that the stuff of life!

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