Yesterday evening, it was a regular morning– I mean evening was evening, but I am just clarifying that it was a fine and regular morning and a very good night before that. It is not really end of the universe kind of breaking news, I know, but I just told you so, so what? Ok, I’ll try again—It was a really good night before the morning after which was regular, kind of morning, when, I looked at the sun, and thought this is not the last time sun is going to shine above me, and yesterday evening, I was all washed-up, had half a glass of wine that was gifted to be by my sister a week back. I was all ready to go to my weekend salsa lessons. My partner there is a 10th grade girl. We try to play caroms without touching the board, we do touch “the board”—when we are dancing, because there won’t be any game otherwise, but other than that, we realize that I am 24 and she is 14. So we did an odd-meter salsa move on a 4-4 Macarena song. I know that we are at least 10000 life years away from each other inside the mind (not a good thing to say I know), so we have no problem in staving off the odd occasion of sexual tension that we feel between us. Well I don’t blame her age for the “gap”, the 25 and 24 year olds that I have been with haven’t often given me any signs that I am getting any younger. At the end of all of it, I get the same answer—“I don’t think I know you”.
After the class, I casually checked out her bag which she was carrying (yes I am a maniac who likes to peek and poke into everything, stay away from me). It had a book, I opened it, and in front of me were five questions, which is why I am writing this today, not really, I keep raising these things in mind, but now I had to write about it because I opened a 10th grade textbook, which asked the following questions in “Hindi”:
–How would be a human life without death?
–Is death necessary for a human, or not?
–what would be the basic human values in a life without death?
So the basic question that almost got me speechless outside and tumultuous inside was:
“What would happen if humans don’t die?” “What is the gift that we are going to defy?” (A single question)
At first, I thought, how come such questions are asked of 10th grade kids? Then I referred to the poem that was written on top of the questions, I found out that the most of the questions could be answered by just looking up the poem. I am not going to discuss the existential risks that might accouter the terms immortality or long-life—The answer in the book was “If humans won’t die, then humans all around the world will cry”.
If you ask me the meaning of chabietzer, in such a world, I would say that it is the name of another planet I had been to last month. It wouldn’t make any sense for me to go there right now at 11.15 at night when I am already quite settled in the bed, enjoying the food and daily dose of comedy. The technical civilization that I am part of right now is just a mere coincidence, and that I am writing this and you are reading this is happening in spite of infinitesimal chance calculated by a thing called Mathematics invented on this planet.
Just to put into perspective—what are we trying to accomplish right now? And what would this planet try to accomplish if the creatures inside it would live forever? Would the people from chabietze still send some better advertisements signals to us? I doubt they still would, in the similar way people here would talk and “feel” about the situation of poor but won’t do anything to de-poor them (put that on my poor English please).
If God is still watching, scratching his nose, flailing his beard, and getting ready to get into bed with next 5 Victoria secret angels in his part of the universe called heaven, he would just squint at one of the screens broadcasting events on earth and say—“It still ain’t that bad, is it honey? Come here”.
“And what is that you are going to do, you dickhead? (I ask myself) Always keep pussy-mouthing about wanting to live for 500 years!
Why are you mad at me? “I ain’t, just the fucking way I express”
Oh, it’s fine then
“Don’t you think you will be fed up with happiness and tired of sadness after 60 odd years?” Yeah, I guess, but that is not the point
“Then what is it?” I am going to survive the test of evolution, I’m going to test the machine called as “can make you god, might kill you”. I will be one of the most adaptable creatures in the history of civilizations that have and will exist in this galaxy.
“Hmm…Not for nothing, sounds good”.
Yes, then in a fit of inexplicable phantasm, I will use my machine and blow away the solar system.
“I thought you would do better”
Don’t worry; we will have a super computer which can produce a copy of everything that has lived so far. That machine will be found by some ape-like creatures in some damn system, and so life will find its way—no fillips and caveats there please!
Back to the question, first of all, syntactically, gods will be offended if humans really discover ambrosia-like stuff, “that is why we are gods”—they would yell. Heavens will enter an abysmal recession and people there will start in-sourcing, but to no use. Hell would be overcrowded because people can’t live such long-lives without committing any sins. After a while, bored of watching phlegm coming out of each others noses, they would request Satan to go for a merger, as it can only be good for the milky-way economy. Of course, economists and freaks like me on the earth would have predicted this thing long time ago, but after all, god is god, and why would he listen to anybody, as I said elsewhere on the blog that evolution happens really, really slowly.
Scientific research will take new turn; researchers will now instead try to dig out medicines that give painless death. People, who were making a living by setting up social foundations against “euthanasia” and the like, would now be making money by switching their course work towards Anti-cryonics, of course, they will be spending most of their times in the jails. Jails, which will become more like shot-term marriage-experienced houses, will undergo a strategic change as a part of move ordered due to unreasonableness found in the studies about life imprisonment. In a way, people too would realize that crime ain’t of any rewarding benefit; crime-rate might go down to the fear of law-makers and law-protectors.
Because lot of us don’t mind anything “trying-once”, so we can be “Not a very good thing to say” in Broken arrow, “It was nice to win the match” in the world up 11003, “I am sorry but he is no more” in the local hospital, “you are just good for nothing, aren’t you?” in the office, and anything else one might possibly think of. All the so called CEO’s and leader’s of the world who have made millions (and name) by masking chance with hard work, will no longer do it, because nobody would care. These so called leaders would be shocked, because they will suddenly realize that they are not good for anything except bossing around, that too that they could boss around because people did not know what to do, and there was no time to disagree with the bosses. There will be days when we will walk into an office for interview and say “Can I take a vacation of 100 years once after every 200 years? Ok, that will be fine, will be the answer coming from behind the desk.
Divorce rates would be sky-high, everybody would give marriage a shot instead of dating first and working towards marriage. Marriages would see unprecedented levels of understanding. There won’t be any “I will spend rest of my life with you” vows. It will be understood between the husband and wife that there are bound to be differences over such a long period of time. So let’s be together while we can indifferently bear our differences. So I now understand a bit about how Hindu god Krishna had had a million wives.
So to cut the long story short, there are enormous possibilities. It is ridiculous to say the least, that we grope for the right kind of combination for about 50 years (depends actually), and when we are at our wisest possible self, we have to die. What do I know, I might not become the next whatever, but I certainly would not want to die after just experiencing few love affairs, a bit of rat-racing, and lot of doing-things-which-do-not-make-sense.
But how we control population you ask—simple- A simple FIFO system will take care of itself; world population will be kept in check with a count. As soon as the population level exceeds a certain limit of growth rate, the older ones will be relieved of their services to mankind.
Unless we are invaded by aliens, we will run out of ideas to do anything in a different way. Everything from air-football, alien-animal-human-combination movies, burning self-help books and laughing in front of the burning pyres, to going back in time and behaving like chimps—everything that we can possibly think of will exhaust sometime. We will grovel in the past for few thousand years and then I’ll destroy the solar system?.
Today, it is Sunday, when I had picked up that book yesterday; I thought whether I would remember thinking about immortality after few earth years. Because then, there would be nothing called as immortality. Not only will we act stranger to lots of people we know and we will know, but if we forget to watch ourselves in the mirror everyday, we might freak out if we decide to do otherwise after a gap of few hundred years. I empathize with poet who had written the prose that was attached to the questions in the book, but I think even he knows that poems are emotional states, 90 percent of the times rhyming is on top of the agenda, than making sense, of course because it rhymes, so it does make sense.
So I danced to one my favorite Hindi tracks Ai Zindagi gale laga le – meaning “Hey life embrace me”. I usually dance in the front of the mirror when I want to make sure that I look weird, practice it really. I still couldn’t expunge those lines that I had read from the book, from my damn brain, and then this song talking about life, everything just seemed intergalactic for a moment. It felt like I had been living this life for few hundred years, and this is 12000th year of my life, in that context, but then again when I stopped dancing, I was back to normal, and couldn’t help penning down this thing.
May be we have got it wrong, I feel, may be if we had devised a system where everyday was called a year; may be, we are already living a long life, may be we don’t value every waking hour and every waking second, may be we live in the future, in the past, in everything else except the present, which seems to be passing like a bus that has no number and never seems to be on time, never mind, time will see another day.
I don’t know if such a thing (living forever) would be a mistake or not, but even if it is a mistake, I would rather like people to err on life’s side.
