In mood to be a bit on the philosophical side. Why is everyone so afraid of death? Isn't death going back to the steady state which we all belong to? Life is just a whim of few billion cells. They have had their time and are back to the steady state. Why are we so afraid of it?

I don't know, I haven't thought about it much either, a wiseman once remarked that youth doesn't think much of death and old doesnt think about anything else at all.

What sparked my interest on death? India recently hanged Dhanonjoy Chatterjee who was convicted on raping and then murdering a fourteen year old girl 'Hetal Parekh' a very heinous crime. He was hanged on June 25, 2004 at 4 am IST (Indian Standard Time). As Calgary is twelve and half hours behind I kept on counting the minutes as the day went on. I couldn't get any work done.

If I were to know that I would die in at four in the morning how would I feel? Would I be able to sleep? Would I be desperate? Would I be angry? What slough of feelings would I be experiencing? That was a scary thought. The hangman who hanged Dhanonjoy later remarked that he was baffled by how Dhanonjoy took it; Dhanonjoy was calm and quite and even told him that he doesn't harbor any bad feelings towards him.

Two days ago Dr. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross a famous physchiatrist who fought for the dignified ends to terminally ill patients passed away. Earlier in her career, she was appalled by the way terminally ill patients were treated. She studied terminally ill patients and fought againt the apathy of the system. According to her, any terminally ill patient passes through four stages, Rejection, anger, depression and acceptance. Don't know what stage he was in. I guess he must have accepted his fate.

Indians are very good at accepting their fates. We strangely believe that we deserve everything that's happening to us. If something bad happens we are told to accept it as a payback or a retribution for what we have done in earlier births. This strange sense of destiny unnerves me. That's a topic for an other day.

The point I want to make is, we can not really know what the other man is going through, we have to be in his shoes to know what he is thinking. Every human being has this super human strength in him which every one can muster if he is going through dire circumstances. We being humble, naive and stupid falsely attribute this strength to God.