'TAKE UP A CAUSE, FALL IN LOVE; WRITE A BOOK'

Captain John Carter, the protagonist of the movie, John Cater of Mars, tells his nephew: ‘Take up a cause, fall in love; write a book’.

Such a beautiful quote! It highlights the very essence of life. But what most people do is they just fall in love; that too, often with the fear of losing it. While only the love that is fearless gives freedom, most people neither take up a cause nor write a book. The former helps in giving us a purpose in life, the latter guarantees that there would be something concrete (in the form of a book) you have contributed to keep your name intact in the annals of human history. It is my personal opinion that every person has at least a single story to share with the world and that they can do it in the form of a book.

While love may be easy to find, marriage is not. In the days of slavery, to fall in love with a slave was almost a guarantee that the love story would end in tragedy. Slavery was as much a part of the ancient Greeks as it were of the Colonial Age. But, slavery ended and it heralded a new dawn in the chapter of romantic love and marriages. However, not everything was rosy for the cupid hearts. There are still the societal prejudices against inter-religious /inter-tribe marriages. So, in reality, mankind may be at the threshold of landing a man on Mars, but the narrow mindedness of antiquity has still persisted among a large portion of its population.

I don’t know why people oppose inter-caste/tribe/religion marriages, but the only logical explanation would be to maintain the purity of bloodline of their respective race/tribe/caste/religion. Why do they do that? Maybe, it’s an instinctive response to stop the ‘pollution’ of their gene pools, evolved over millennia of natural selection. And I am pretty sure, majority of mankind wouldn’t understand the meaning of the previous sentence! So, in reality, I am wasting time in trying to explain an illogical aspect of mankind.

So, where have we reached now? Captain John Carter of Mars is still right about the way to live a fulfilled life; with purpose, love and a legacy. What is your legacy you are planning to leave behind? It is after death that the soul gets to read its epitaph written by others of what we had represented of ourselves when we were alive. Won’t it be wonderful to write down our obituary while we are still alive and strive to live a life so that our epitaph would read the obituary that we had written by ourselves?