Was returning home from office yesterday, when I stopped by at the key maker’s. There were a couple of other elederly men there, and were discussing current affairs, as usual. Because of the lack of options, I reluctantly started overhearing their conversation. Little did I know, that this would turn out to be the most sensible talk that I would heard in the entire day, or may be in the entire week too.
The key maker was kinda working late, so an elderly man there were asking him to hurry up. As an analogy, he said that “it is the law of nature, see, even birds go home when the sun sets. Only a few work late, like eagles, kites and vultures, but they too, only till a stipulated time.” This sentence kinda caught my attention. Then the conversation drifted to whether one can see such birds these days, and the same guy said that yes, you can easily find them at Parsi crematoriums, where the funeral rituals include laying up corpses of the deceased in empty wells, where they are preyed upon by kites and vultures, and eagles. “Strange are the ways of some”, he said. The other two people there laughed acknowledgingly. But then the man said, “There’s nothing wrong in that too….In some communities they burn, in some they bury; Parsis feed them to birds: So even after they are dead, they are used in feeding hungry birds. So what if it sounds odd, Parsis make difference to the world even as they leave it!”
Isn’t that insightful? I mean, being so much educated, and supposedly fitting into the ‘intellectual’ category of people; I had not even thought about why Parsis could be cremating their dead bodies that way; let alone thinking about them so profoundly. But an elderly,lonely, probably not very educated country man woke me up from my delusions. Philosophy, my friends, isn’t the copyright of Paulo Coelho or Ayn Rand; or even the myriad Yogis and sages. Philosophy is delivered by any one who wants to think, and say his thoughts aloud!!!
Well, I am generally delighted when I get to know anything that is informative and at the same time intelligent and insightful; and given that, the man surely made my day!!!
Amruta's Writing Block! 
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