We got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen!

By John Cheeran
Soon our universities should start courses on how to handle life.
I know there are religions and their texts that teach and threaten man, woman and child.
They, of course, do tell us how to handle life.
But the point is that we need a practical guide redesigned for contemporary times.
Our times that is.
Have I handled life in the best possible manner so far? No, not at all. I have made my mistakes and continue to make them. The point is that I'm still alive, I haven't admitted defeat so far.
Suicides do not depress but enrage me almost always. Especially when the young embrace the final exit.
I write these lines after reading the obituary of Abhilash Pillai who was a student at Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) Kanpur. Why should an IITian should commit suicide?
What great existential dilemma has driven him to take out his own life.?
I wish he murdered a few and spent some time contemplating life in the prison bars (that is if he did not get adequate legal support).
That would have been a more honorable thing to do than ending his own life and there by snuffing out the light from his parents' lives and from those who were near to him.
Getting into an IIT is an educated Indian youth's dream.
It has become an impossible dream for many in the age of caste-based reservations and the sheer class that you should have to beat the rigorous tests.
Abhilash (it means Desire!) beat the tests, cracked the barriers and made it to the IIT. But then he himself cracked.
In India, and all over the world, the less-gifted battle for two square meals everyday. They don't dream about IITs, but their next meal. But they display an unquantifiable amount of optimism and energy every moment. They may not even be literate but they know how to unravel the mysteries of life.
They engage life head on and leave little room for doubts to creep in.
Mysteries of life are mysteries of mind. IITs do not teach you how to unravel the mysteries of life nor mysteries of mind.
It is easy to preach, I know. We all are programmed to die.
But as D.H. Lawrence wrote in his Lady Chatterley's Lover, "Ours is essentially a tragic age, so we refuse to take it tragically. We got to live, no matter how many skies have fallen."
Yes, we got to live, we got to live.