How’s one to even know? I mean you know how these things are? I mean what Socrates said to Plato, or Plato to someone else, I cannot really tell, and it wouldn’t matter much who it was that said it to whom because it is the truth of it, or the lack of it, that really matters, does it not? One of them said to the other, or one of them said to quite another at the time of dying, rather loaded with perspicacity: the time has now come for us to part, I to death, you to life, none will ever know which is better. Kya baat hai, bhaaisaaab! Bahot khoob!

I mean, yes, the quizzards may want to be precise about these things, you know, who said what to whom, and what is it that was precisely said. Would it have mattered if Enlightenment actually dropped on the Buddha under a mango tree, instead of a peepul? It is not peepul that is the essential thing, is it? It is the attainment of Enlightenment; it is the fact of the Buddha attaining Enlightenment that is of core import, the quizzards can go hang themselves by the peepul or the banyan or the mango or the palm or whatever it is they wish to hang or not hang themselves by. Let them hang, they’ve had it coming.

But to return to this life thing and this death thing: how is one to know and what is one to know? Not the better or worse thing, that we shall never know as the erudite Greeks have already let us know, but, you know, this rather more mundane thing about a natural thing and an unnatural or a not-natural thing. You know, of course, you do. Matlab they say naa... So and so died a natural death, and therefore it was kind of okay because it was natural. And so, by implikayshun, the rest of the deaths are not okay because they are not natural, although that may not mean they are unnatural because those deaths are not happening in things or time or places or causes that are not natural, they are not happening in Tollywood type things where everything is not what anything is, you know. You know what I mean. So what is this natural death, and when, pray, may we believe it has happened naturally? Not for anything else. Just so we may know when it happens unnaturally. Like death by hanging from a cauliflower kind of thing you know. That would be unnatural, you would know if you killed the cauliflower or the cauliflower killed you. Although, truth to tell, if you are in the proximity of a cauliflower long enough please be assured it killed you. If you are confused, think Hiroshima. Or Nagasaki. Okay, bye, sayonara.

When we go away

Or that’s what they say

That away is which way

And actually how far away?