REQUIEM

If one must see the artistic side of hypocrisy then one must attend a memorial service, a requiem. It is amusing and at the same time quite disgusting too. Often, the eulogies sung for the departed is delivered with the same effectiveness as the invectives showered when the person was alive.

I indeed was amused at some of the words and pretentious phrases that were offered at a memorial service I went to, the other day. The service was in remembrance of people in the Malayalam film industry who died in this year since January. “Good mother of God” someone exclaimed rightly there were more than a dozen of them. Not just old blokes but mostly in their mid life. Pretty early to have gone, I thought.

Of the many eulogies that were offered, I felt that only a few, very few sounded honest, sincere and matter of fact. Reserving kindness for the dead after they have departed is rather an exercise in waste and dishonesty. But then the departed seldom come back to comment and express on the encomiums sung at memorials.

Personally, I dissent with the law of Nature that is quite cruel and sadistic that many who are in the threshold of life and thereabouts are pushed down stiff and dead. But one cannot go afar in these matters as the mystery gets curiouser and curosier when you think about it.

Of all matters what was annoying was the speakers at the memorial leaving the venue once their bit of eulogies were said. It was direct smacking of those dead cheeks with their extended limbs of insincerity a specious interlude. I wondered what it could be in their mortal life that was pulling them to some other destination. It was obvious that their presence was just an exaggerated exercise in pretension.

What is putative misery about such gatherings are the wishes and remarks, that the departed have safe journey to the celestial world and their “souls” rest in peace. Goodness gracious what the heck is that -“soul”?

I once read a statement of the late Rajneesh comparing death to orgasm. The later, he may have experienced many times over, but wonder how he could equate that pleasure- to the feeling in death.  One can never know or tell the feeling outside biological existence! Mr. Rajneesh hasn’t come back since he died to narrate the orgasmic enthrallment he experienced in death.  I suppose he was being metaphorical here or may be euphemistic.

Isn’t this talk of soul and peace unto the soul plainly false and simply quibbling? A desperate attempt at trying to satisfy the hankering for mortality?

Come on, as I mentioned elsewhere in some post no one has come back from dead to write a travelogue. Feeding ourselves on fatuous matters is helping us no where further. Attributing truth to something that has not been proven or is simply preposterous is stupid mistake. If the mystery cannot be solved as Bertrand Russell observed suspend judgment rather than mystify and mythicise it.