Festivals: Floodgates To Goodwishes!

If there are so many people in a gathering and everyone shakes everyone else's hands, how many handshakes are there in all?  Thus goes the famous riddle that most of us have come across when learning the Arithmetic Series.  A good thing about handshakes is that whether you take the lead and shake the other person's hands or the other seizes the lead, once the hands are shaken you are done.  Goodwishes are more demanding.  When one person has taken the lead, the other must reciprocate.  Thus, the answer to the riddle mentioned in the beginning, would have to be doubled if it was goodwishes instead of handshakes!

Again, while while you can shake hands only with an individual, you can greet people individually, or in groups - small and large, regional and national, local and global, friends and colleagues, family and acquaintances et al.  Of course any individual is quite likely to figure in more than one of your groups and so each one gets greeted multiple times by the same individual and feels obliged to respond as many times.  Add to this the multiplicity of channels, greeting in person, greeting through a voice call, greetings through SMS, Whatsapp, Facebook, Google+ and what have you.  The multiplication factor for the answer to the original riddle goes up by a few orders of magnitude! Luckily cards are going out of vogue and that means one fewer channel.

If you are already nodding your head in agreement, it shows that you have experienced firsthand the deluge caused by festivals that open the floodgates for pent up goodwishes.  If the goodwishes were to materialize, the world would be instantly turned into something vastly superior to heavens of our imagination.  But instead what happens is this.  Subscriptions to special rate SMS packs are suspended, voice calls get dropped, the broadband bandwidth gets choked and photos, animations, and videos clog the storage space on your electronic communication device.

There does exist a solution to this overload.  It is inspired by banks who have hugely simplified interbank transactions by promoting credit push in place of debit pull.  The proposed solution will replace push with pull instead.  This would drastically reduce the number of greetings by limiting it to just the number of persons who wish to greet each other.  And it is simple!  Let there be a greetings registry.  All greeters must register here.  Now if one wishes to greet others on a particular occasion, he can put his greeting on the site.  The site will not push it to anyone.  Instead whoever so wants, will have to pull it.  So I log into the registry, and ask for Dipawali greeting from my friend X.  If he has posted a greeting, the greeting is personalized with my registered name and shown to me.  Those who post greetings can also be given the facility of a associating a negative list (to deny greetings to a few chosen people) or a positive list (if the greeting is meant only for a single persons or a few persons.)

One problem with this suggestion is that bosses, wives, and OGFs (Opposite Gender Friends) may feel offended if the greeting addresses them with just their registered names unqualified by any superlatives.  Hopefully they can take it in their stride.

And so, dear readers, pending creation of this registry, I dedicate this post to each one of you and wish you a very Happy Dipawali and a New Year filled with joy, prosperity and good health.  (This is in addition to my SMS, Whatsapp, FB and Google+ greetings!)  The fact that you have read this post is reciprocation enough.

Terminal Bill

Apart from the small change donations that go into the kitty of godmen, a major source is the lifelong savings of aged devotees.  The devotees are told to lead a spartan life that doesn't dent their lifelong savings.  And then they are persuaded to trade it with the godman for a guaranteed place in the heaven.

But Babadom is not alone in this business of cornering the savings of old and aged.  The medical profession follows close in their footsteps. Of those who do not surrender to a Guru and also those who do, not all are lucky enough to have an uneventful kind of death.  For most it will be preceded by an illness long or short and many will find their way to the dreaded ICU.  There the hapless fellow and his family are purged of their savings, more often than not to be finally told that that is all that the medical science could do.

Medical science has made much progress and it stands to reason to press all their life saving skills into service if a child or a productive young man falls sick.  But does it make sense to prolong an old and dying man's life by a few miserable months or days at huge cost and through insufferable procedures?  Instead of focusing on expensive diagnosis and treatments, will it not be okay just to manage the pain and suffering and help the person die with dignity?  Why should medical science and society place so much store by the 'quantity' of life instead of quality?  And why should we fight with death when it comes knocking and is expected too?

Part of the problem lies with the family and society as well.  The society prods the family to go for as expensive a treatment as they can afford even when the outcome is known with near certainty.  The family seldom has the courage to resort to logic and ward off sadistic pressures from society.

The family can be empowered only by the person concerned himself.  And he must do so while he is still healthy and in full possession of his faculties.  And thus it will be good if a person deals with this aspect clearly in his will and gives unambiguous instructions regarding the kind of treatment to be given or not to be given to him if things go wrong, and the kind of rites to be performed after his demise.

Can we also trust the medical community to rise above commercial consideration and advise people properly and rationally in terminal situations?