ACC Lecture

Death
Dear Mr P N Iyer, Chief Executive, ACC Ltd, Mr Gautam Mukhopadhyay, Director, Eastern
Region, ACC Concrete, and dear friends; I generally attend all your symposiums held in and around
Kolkata. I really marvel at Mr Mukhopadhyays choice of venue! Last year I addressed a similar
convention at a wonderful place called Vedic Village near Rajarhat. And today, I was stunned to see the
beauty of this place. How beautiful this place is! My car dropped me off at quite a distance from this hall.
I walked along the wonderfully crafted pathways and wooden bridges enjoying the scenery and thinking
in my mind what I would speak to you about. Then as I entered the main hall of this building, I saw the
impressive paintings depicting the scenes of the Battle of Plassey and other scenes associated with the
British East India Company.
I have decided to speak to you on a most controversial topic Death! I suppose some of you are
already thinking in your minds O look at this! We have been having such a wonderful time here, staying
in this beautiful holiday resort, having wonderful discussions and entertainment, and here comes a monk
playing spoil-sport! Well, please bear with me for some time. I do have something very important to tell
you.
Our entire life is spent in a network of inter-human relationships. During the course of our lives,
we build strong emotional bonds with our parents, relatives and friends. These bonds give us sufficient
inner strength to deal with blows that reality deals us ever so often; these bonds give us what we call as a
shoulder to cry on. But, let me analyze the strength of those bonds. You will all agree that when the
moment of death arrives, not one of these close people can do anything for us. When we are about to
die, in fact, their presence, their sorrow at our dying, may only add to the misery that we all face! I am not
being a cynic here; I am just placing before you the reality of things, thats all. Have you ever heard of
someone being able to avert one of his near and dear one from death? Well, some of you may say,
Savithri did that to her husband! And I say, apocryphal! No. No such thing ever happened, ever!
Let me ask you all something. How many of you have planned for your death? You see, we are
all living people in this room. One thing is sure about our lives. We will all die one day. Of course, the
exact time, place and circumstance of your end may be difficult to predict. But we are all going to face
death in the future. Being expert businessmen, it is in your blood to plan for eventualities. So, how is it
that we plan for every possible eventuality but we dont do so regarding our own death? Of course, we all
take our various insurance policies on our life and stuff like that. But do we plan on the details of how we
are going to face the moment when we shall breathe our last? What will we be thinking of when we will
meet our end? Well, hardly anyone of us does that. Monks however do just that. You know, in the
Mahabharata, there is a wonderful incident. Due to certain events, once all the Pandava brothers had lost
their lives and Yudhisthira alone survived. He was told that if he answered all the questions of a Yaksha,
a demigod, satisfactorily, his other brothers would revive. One of the questions the Yaksha asked was this
what is the most surprising thing on earth? And Yudhisthiras answer is marvelous. He replied, Every
day we see people dying all around us. But none of us ever think that we are going to die! just see how
true this is!
In India, we have devoted a huge amount of time and energy on this question of death. Some of
the brightest minds have spent their whole lives on this issue and we have a whole fund of knowledge on
this topic. Slowly, with the passage of time, a sort of prestige started associating itself with this field. The
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people who specialized in this field of death, what happens after death, how to prepare for facing death,
and stuff like that, are the Monks. This dress that I wear symbolizes that my area of specialization
death. Not in a morbid way, but in a most positive way.
There is however one danger in dealing with this subject. We are afraid of death. The very subject
paralyses us. When we think about death a lot, we lose all incentive to enjoy this life. We agree that we
are all going to die sometime in the future. But, at present, we are all alive. And the joy of living is
snuffed out by giving too much thought to death. This has been the bane of India. It is for this reason
primarily that India sank down to the bottom in the comity of Nations for the last 500 years. We have
become obsessed with death. As a result, activity and possession lost meaning for us. No matter what you
do here on earth, no matter what your achievements are here on earth, one day, you have to leave
everything and pass away. Hence, as a race, we have lost faith in life, lost faith in activity, lost faith in
industry. In India, even today, we have a sort of guilt in making money. Dont we look down upon
someone who is rich in this country? Even today, in the 21st century, isnt this so? And I ask you, isnt it
absurd?
Not so in the West. There too, people are equally afraid of death. But their love of life is
phenomenal. The way they live their life, it will seem as if they are oblivious to the fact that their life will
soon end. The pace at which they acquire possessions, it is mind-boggling. They represent the other end
of the spectrum, the antipode of what we represent in India. The message I bring you from Ramakrishna
Mission, from Swami Vivekananda, from Vedanta is that both these viewpoints are at fault and a viamedia is necessary to bring a balance into our lives.
You will remember the ancient Persian emperor Nadir Shah. He raided India many times and
looted an enormous amount of wealth from here and took it to his country. One day he was on his death
bed. At that time, it is said, he asked that all that wealth be arranged in a heap in front of him. And then, it
is said, he ordered that when he was to be buried, his hands were supposed to be kept above the grave for
the whole world to see. The whole world was to see what? That, no matter how much of material wealth
you acquire in this life, when you die, you leave with your hands completely empty. You cant take so
much a needle with you when you die.
On the other hand, you have this life to live; not to kill yourself with morbidity even before death
stops you from functioning! You know, a man was once walking down a road. Suddenly he started
howling and crying and collapsed on the road. Passers-by asked him the matter. He showed them a
banana skin on the road and said, Do you see that lying there? Do you know what it means? I have to
now put my foot on it, slip and fall down! Others explained to him, Why do you think like that? Let the
banana skin lie there. You take a careful detour and walk past it! Some of you may have read the book
City of Joy by Larry Collins and Dominique Lappiere. It is a wonderful book on this city of Calcutta. I
read it as a school boy. There is one incident in it that struck me very deeply. There is a rickshaw puller in
one of the innumerable slums of Calcutta. He has developed Tuberculosis. Slowly he starts coughing up
blood. He is terrified. He has no money to go to a doctor and get medicines. Some of his friends give him
a novel remedy. They ask him to start chewing paan. You know the reason? So that when he coughs up
blood, he wont know whether it is paan or blood that he is spitting out! That is the way we approach
death. Most of our remedies for death are like that.

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Death is a certainty, no second thoughts on that. But that thought need not paralyze us. Rather, it
ought to impel us to try and get the best out of this life in such a way that our mode of living this life will
itself prepare us for the grand finale! Is such a thing possible getting the best of both worlds? Vedanta
says that is very much possible.
We are completely bound by the idea that we are indispensable. We feel that this world will end
if we do not take care of it! So full of ourselves are we! I have heard that in one of our very good Indian
companies, they have a ritual they enact when one of their employees retire. I believe they place a bucket
of water on a table and the retiring guy sticks his hand into it. It looks as though his hand is essential for
that bucket of water, and that if he removes his hand, there will be a hollow in the place where his hand
was. Then he removes his hand. What happens? Does the hollow created by his hand remain? No. water
rushes in from everywhere and fills it up instantly! Same is the case with our lives too. When we die, the
world doesnt feel our absence in any way. Life rushes in from all around and fills the void created by our
departure!
So, we shall know that we are entirely dispensable. Yet, we shall not sit idly. We shall exert
ourselves to our utmost. We shall utilize this brief period of life that is given to us. We shall utilize it well
in making our lives better, more comfortable, knowing all the time that we have to leave all this and go
away sometime. Now, let me repeat this idea once again, slowly; We shall utilize it well in making our
lives better, more comfortable, knowing all the time that we have to leave all this and go away sometime.
You will notice that this will call for a new style of working. This is where Swami Vivekananda makes a
vital contribution. He has introduced an entirely new outlook amongst us called Practical Vedanta, an
entirely new style of working called Karma Yoga.
Too much attention on death has paralyzed our nation. We have become, as it were, a group of
zombies. We have no end of desires; and we have no initiative to achieve any of our desires, for, the
moment we start exerting ourselves for achieving any meaningful goal, immediately our mind rings out
with the logic that this world is ephemeral! This internal conflict is a common feature in most Indian
minds. That is stopping us from unleashing our potential. When Swami Vivekanandas ideas are put into
practice that conflict will stop.
Swamiji says we shall all work. Even whining and squirming about the ephemerality of this world
is work. So, why not work meaningfully. We shall remember that there is a great yajna already going on
in this world. In modern terms, this grand yajna is called Economy. Take part in it. Be a part of it. Know
that you can contribute to it. Start contributing, but always keep this larger picture in your mind. You are
a part of the whole picture, but you are not indispensable. Take from the grand economy and give to it
too. To work in this style, with this attitude, is Karma Yoga. By working like this, we achieve a fulfilment
in our own lives. Death is then but a part of the whole scheme. We shall work in such an efficient way
that we are fully in-charge of our duties. We shall keep discharging our duties, fulfilling our due
responsibilities. In this way, when death approaches us at any point, we are not left wondering about what
will happen after I am gone. Everything is arranged in the grand scheme that in our absence too, the same
work will go on.
Swamiji gave a new way of looking at things. In a letter he writes, I preach a new ideal, a new
doctrine, a new life. This is the ideal we will all need to follow. We are to look upon this entire life as a

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preparation for death. The more useful this life we lead, the more meaningful this life we lead, that much
more prepared will we be to end it all when death approaches us.
Kindly think about these ideas. You will get more details about this when you read Swami
Vivekanandas lectures and letters. They are available with me at Belur Math. I welcome you all to visit
our Math when time permits. I thank Mr Mukhopadhyay & Mr Iyer for inviting me to address you all
today. Thank you.
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