Lessons and some beautiful lines from "Five People You Meet In Heaven"

• "All endings are also beginnings. We just don't know it tat time."
• You will start believing this if you read the book during the same time as watching "JAB we MET" just like me. I think something has to end for something else to begin. Even when life ends the life at heaven begins is what is told here.
• "All human lives are well connected. NO story sits by itself. Sometimes stories meet at corners and sometimes they cover one another completely like stones beneath a river."
• "Death does not just take someone. It also misses someone else, and in the small distinction between being taken and missed, lives are changed. This is why we are drawn to babies, and to funerals."
• "Strangers are just family you have yet to come to know."
• "No life is a waste. The only time we waste is the time we spend thinking we are alone."
• Well something prevents me from agreeing to this wholeheartedly.
• "Over the centuries, courage has been confused with picking up arms and cowardice confused with laying them down."
  
• I totally agree with this. I think real courage is in facing day to day small battles of life without losing heart. Courage is to take up responsibility when you not taking it wont be noticed. Courage is to tell the truth when you know it will harm your reputation. Courage is to make a promise and be committed to it than not making a promise at all.
• "He felt as if a string had just shot from his heart and looped around her shoulders, pulling her close, making her his. He loved her more in that moment than he thought he ever could love anyone."
  
• I think every person should be lucky to experience that one moment in life.
• "Sacrifice is a part of life and not something to be regretted. Sometimes when you are sacrificing something precious, you are not really losing it. You are just passing it on to someone else."
• "We move through places every day that would never have been if not for the people who came before us."
  
• Fills me with a sense of gratitude for those who have contributed in small or large ways for where I am today.
• "Holding anger is a poison. It eats you from inside. We think that hating is a weapon that attacks a person who harmed us. But hatred is a curved blade. And the harm we do, we do to ourselves."
• "Love, like rain , can nourish from above, drenching couples with a soaking joy. But sometimes, under the angry heat of life, love dries on the surface and must nourish from below, tending to its roots, keeping itself alive."
• "Lost love is still love. It takes a different form, thats all. You cant see their smile or bring them food or tousle their hair or move them around a dance floor. But when these senses weaken, another heightens. Memory. Memory becomes your partner. You nurure it. You hold it. You dance with it."
  
• Love is something that makes the lives of human beings alive.
  

Astrology

Astrology-"the study of the movements and positions of the sun, moon, planets and stars, and the skill of describing the expected effect that these are believed to have on the character and behavior of humans". This is all Cambridge dictionary told me about it.

Being from a biotech background and working as an Analyst in the corporate world, how-much-ever unconnected the two fields may sound, I have no clue how some celestial bodies floating somewhere in the universe can decide how my mom takes the news of me having a boyfriend or my boss deciding my annual rating or for that matter Shahrukh Khan’s "Om shanti Om" being a hit. I was wondering about this sitting in a room in which patches of the walls tried to take a peek at me from behind the innumerable posters and banners that spoke high of astrology, depicted planets as deities and had tables representing the positions of planets which made me recall my practical notebooks of eleventh grade. I was there for a reason. It is not as strong as the previous sentence may sound. It is because my uncle took me there. :) We were treated as VIPs as my uncle is a long time friend of that astrologer who makes money predicting others lives. This gave me the chance to observe a lot of things based on his interaction with his other customers.

Customer No. 1:

A mid-aged man with a hangdog look complains about his daughter- "I sent her to college thinking she will become an engineer, but she has forced me to leave all my dreams about her and plead the parents of that guy who does not even come close to the imagination I had about the groom I would get for her. The problem is she is elder to him and my daughter has "Mangala Dosha". I don’t know how I could even go and ask them about it". Our "solution-for-all" guru says with a wry smile and know-it-all attitude-"Well, that does not look like a problem to me. Date of birth can always be changed and kundali modified to get rid of problems. In fact, why don’t u get the horoscope of the guy. I can tailor your daughter’s horoscope to that."

Wow, that’s cool. Marriage is reduced do a garment business. If we can change everything in the horoscope, why do we need to match them? These questions of mine may never get answered.

Customer No. 2:

An old man with lines on his forehead that speak about his unmarried daughter gets in with some pieces of paper out of which all or one may end up in the dustbin in the corner of the room after the astro researcher speaks up. "Sir, I have these options in front of me. Can you tell me which of these is the best match?" Not spending more than 5 seconds on each, he says. "Well, I don’t recommend any of them". That man with the same look on his face after paying 20 Rs.

Is this great astrologer so proficient to make that out in 5 seconds? Probably at his age the visual power itself will bring a delay of 10 seconds. Or may be he can make that out and it is just my limitation to suspect it. But how was he sure that those horoscopes were not tailored artificially for someone else? ;)

Customer No. 3:

This time it is a woman who brings the horoscope of her very successful son who has everything but is not getting married and is 35 years old already. She asks –"My son is 35 and is not married yet. "

What is the whole point? You should be handing over the horoscope and be asking that guy to predict the scenario with marriage and not be letting the whole thing out.

Our astro king brushes it off with a bombastic statement –" How is it possible madam? I see that Shani has become asthadipati and is higher to Budha who has been looking at mangala from 4th house."

Does that make even one iota of sense to a layperson? What is he intending to do here?

" He will have to visit a temple which is beyond the hills and the mountains and do a pooja there. I understand that he will be busy with it. Let me suggest something for your good. It can be done by someone like us. All you will have to do is pay us some 5000 bucks. That’s all. That is nothing compared to your son’s future"

Great. I got my answer.

I thought horoscopes describe the way things take their course. So can that be changed by doing what he said. Will Budha stop looking at Mangala? How will that happen unless you change it and reprint it?

Customer No. 4

A guy of my age is here finally. He wants to know about why he is not successful in his career and is burdened by debt.

Burdened by debt at this age itself?

This lead to the same kind of fuzzy description and the conclusion was to make the guy wear a ruby stone ring on his middle finger. "How much would that cost?" he asks wishing as much as he could that it would not be high. "15000. That is fine. It makes you conquer the sun" comes the answer and I see a total eclipse on the guy’s face.

A guy is burdened by debt and you make him drown a little more by making him spend like this. Is this astro king sure that it helps? Will he pay the debt if it does not help? Ah look at his hand. I could see all the precious stones on the earth dancing on his fingers. Does this guy have no problems in his life now that he has conquered all the planets and stars?

The guy is hesitant to go ahead with it when asked if they could call the jeweler there itself. Of course, commissions are an unsaid part of it. After a lot of –"Go ahead" and "Hmm, I need to think", the astro says with the same know-it-all tone –" Your horoscope tells me you are stubborn and you wont listen"

Then why the hell were they trying to suggest or advise?

The guy leaves the room with nothing changing in his life other than the fact that now his pocket was lighter after those ten 10 Rupee notes left his pocket.

After all this I am left alone for a whole day of pondering on many things I see in life. I do believe that there is a power which is the reason for how different lives take their turns, intersect, diverge and converge. But my reservations are about the claims of understanding that power in totality and making a business out of the claim. If someone could conquer the forces that affect our lives, why are they still working for the 100 bucks that the guy gave? If they knew what to do to earn well, why have they not taken over Azim Premji or Narayan Murthy? Given that I have spent only 24 years on this earth, I don’t know what is the absolute truth and may not come to know even after spending 80 years. But that does not stop me from penning down my views and things that make me put my thinking cap on.