This is the name of the book by my leadership guru Robin S. Sharma . It is a must read book but here I am not to discuss the book but give my thoughts on the above line .
After reading this line , my heart and mind went into deep thoughts. I asked to myself , Who Will cry when I die ?
At first instance it seemed to be a very simple question but later on complete analysis , I was surprised that it is a very thinking question. So I will like to discuss my thoughts on this matter.
I started thinking with what I am doing now ?? Here by I , I am referring to majority of today's generation from my perspective.
Take a look at our own generation, especially those of us who have migrated to big cities in the search of big career/money, I have achieved money, career , etc. but still I feels lonely (and hence, to fill the void in the real world, created virtual identities on platforms like Orkut, Facebook and Twitter or write blogs – sharing ideas while doing really nothing),
We are earning quite decent enough money and live a life of luxury dining in Mac D, pizza hut , etc or shopping and watching or teasing girls(only for guys) in the big malls that keep opening somewhere or the other almost every day.
Let us ask ourselves a simple yet highly disturbing question. After all the education that we have got, exactly how many individuals are going to benefit from our lives or our careers? I think not many. And in most of the cases – even zero. Alas, we do not have time for our parents back home, how are we supposed to have time to do good to others? We are a generation for which success is defined simply in terms of our pay packages and nothing else.
Isn’t it weird that the more the society invests in educating an individual, the less useful he seems to become for the society itself? So, it turns out that a person leaving a simple life may be far more important to the society than the people who have gone to big institutions, have invested lakhs in their higher education and are earning big money for themselves. Why, simply Because his life is not only His life because He is a social person. Whose fault is that? Education? Or society’s? It’s upto the readers to think and decide.
Coming back to the original point, since ours is a generation immersed completely into the race of blind money-making and self-gratification, isn’t it an apt to ask – Who will cry when we die?
Family? Not sure. 30 years from now, many of us will be so cut off from our families back in our home towns, that it seems unlikely that our deaths will be bringing any real loss to them. Parents will already be long gone, and children will most probably have flown off to distant shores like we have in search of even greater money making success.
Colleagues from our offices and our friends of college? Are you kidding me? There may be some friends but for majority I can directly say No. Even for those few friends I have a lot of doubt to be honest.(No offense to any of my friends but I am thinking of a period after 35-40 years or probably greater.) Ours is a generation of job switchers and continuous migration. By the time you become friends with your colleagues, either you have moved on or he has. Sure, a few will obviously hang on with you for life through phone or virtual platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, but can interacting on these platforms really compete with the face-to-face interactions that people in small places have over a home-made or road side hot cup of tea? Leave crying apart, colleagues and friends will be so busy with their office work; they will probably not even have enough time to think about you. Even the place that you are working in will be filled up by some new guy even before your funeral pyre has lost its heat. The world has become a fast moving place not only in life, but in death as well, you see.
Why is that so? May be because we were so engrossed in making success out of our lives that we forgot to devote some part of it to genuine everyday causes that would have connected the society better on an emotional level. What we did instead was that we shopped and shopped and shopped, we dined in great places (which often charge more for the ambience rather than the food itself), we purchased costly cars and other gadgets - and wrote blogs - and ultimately surrounded ourselves so much by these similar things that the real people from the real world were seldom able to have a chat and say a genuine, warm hello to us face to face.
And things to which we gave our time, cars, gadgets, shopping, dining, blogs, work, offices, money simply do not know how and why to cry. People know that, and people is what we forgot to really connect with on a more genuine and humane level.
To be frank, We are living in an Age where we have lost touch with humanity and people and we have to accept it . So , I request you to think that what impact will your life have on the generations that follow you . Do not give a chance to yourself to say or regret; "I could have been that kind of a person but never was ."
Discover yourself , reflect on yourself and think that after death , how you will like to be rememebered and start acting accordingly. As Mahatma Gandhi said , "Be the change you want to see and the world will change."
Remember that when we were born , "We cried , while others rejoiced, why not live our life in such a way that when we die , we rejoice while others cry."
After reading this line , my heart and mind went into deep thoughts. I asked to myself , Who Will cry when I die ?
At first instance it seemed to be a very simple question but later on complete analysis , I was surprised that it is a very thinking question. So I will like to discuss my thoughts on this matter.
I started thinking with what I am doing now ?? Here by I , I am referring to majority of today's generation from my perspective.
Take a look at our own generation, especially those of us who have migrated to big cities in the search of big career/money, I have achieved money, career , etc. but still I feels lonely (and hence, to fill the void in the real world, created virtual identities on platforms like Orkut, Facebook and Twitter or write blogs – sharing ideas while doing really nothing),
We are earning quite decent enough money and live a life of luxury dining in Mac D, pizza hut , etc or shopping and watching or teasing girls(only for guys) in the big malls that keep opening somewhere or the other almost every day.
Let us ask ourselves a simple yet highly disturbing question. After all the education that we have got, exactly how many individuals are going to benefit from our lives or our careers? I think not many. And in most of the cases – even zero. Alas, we do not have time for our parents back home, how are we supposed to have time to do good to others? We are a generation for which success is defined simply in terms of our pay packages and nothing else.
Isn’t it weird that the more the society invests in educating an individual, the less useful he seems to become for the society itself? So, it turns out that a person leaving a simple life may be far more important to the society than the people who have gone to big institutions, have invested lakhs in their higher education and are earning big money for themselves. Why, simply Because his life is not only His life because He is a social person. Whose fault is that? Education? Or society’s? It’s upto the readers to think and decide.
Coming back to the original point, since ours is a generation immersed completely into the race of blind money-making and self-gratification, isn’t it an apt to ask – Who will cry when we die?
Family? Not sure. 30 years from now, many of us will be so cut off from our families back in our home towns, that it seems unlikely that our deaths will be bringing any real loss to them. Parents will already be long gone, and children will most probably have flown off to distant shores like we have in search of even greater money making success.
Colleagues from our offices and our friends of college? Are you kidding me? There may be some friends but for majority I can directly say No. Even for those few friends I have a lot of doubt to be honest.(No offense to any of my friends but I am thinking of a period after 35-40 years or probably greater.) Ours is a generation of job switchers and continuous migration. By the time you become friends with your colleagues, either you have moved on or he has. Sure, a few will obviously hang on with you for life through phone or virtual platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Orkut, but can interacting on these platforms really compete with the face-to-face interactions that people in small places have over a home-made or road side hot cup of tea? Leave crying apart, colleagues and friends will be so busy with their office work; they will probably not even have enough time to think about you. Even the place that you are working in will be filled up by some new guy even before your funeral pyre has lost its heat. The world has become a fast moving place not only in life, but in death as well, you see.
Why is that so? May be because we were so engrossed in making success out of our lives that we forgot to devote some part of it to genuine everyday causes that would have connected the society better on an emotional level. What we did instead was that we shopped and shopped and shopped, we dined in great places (which often charge more for the ambience rather than the food itself), we purchased costly cars and other gadgets - and wrote blogs - and ultimately surrounded ourselves so much by these similar things that the real people from the real world were seldom able to have a chat and say a genuine, warm hello to us face to face.
And things to which we gave our time, cars, gadgets, shopping, dining, blogs, work, offices, money simply do not know how and why to cry. People know that, and people is what we forgot to really connect with on a more genuine and humane level.
To be frank, We are living in an Age where we have lost touch with humanity and people and we have to accept it . So , I request you to think that what impact will your life have on the generations that follow you . Do not give a chance to yourself to say or regret; "I could have been that kind of a person but never was ."
Discover yourself , reflect on yourself and think that after death , how you will like to be rememebered and start acting accordingly. As Mahatma Gandhi said , "Be the change you want to see and the world will change."
Remember that when we were born , "We cried , while others rejoiced, why not live our life in such a way that when we die , we rejoice while others cry."
