The Other Side of Death

me. I couldn’t get even that peace that an ordinary man is able to enjoy. Napoleon Bonaparte’s last words were on these lines: I thought despair was a crime, but today there is none in the world who is more utterly in despair than me. I was hungry for two things: power and love. I got the former, but it did not remain with me. I searched a lot for love but never found it. If human life is what I got, then it is absolutely meaningless, because its final result is nothing but despair and destruction. The Caliph Harun al-Rashid was the ruler of a vast dominion. At the end of his life, he rued: For my whole life, I tried to run away from my sorrow, but, yet, that sorrow still remained. I have led a life of great sorrow and worry. Not a single day of my life have I spent without worrying. Now, I am at the verge of death. Very soon, my grave will eat up my body. This is what is going to finally happen to every human being. Yet, every one of us is oblivious to this. When the time came for the Abbasid Caliph Mansoor to die, he lamented: If I had stayed alive a few days more, I would have destroyed this ruler-ship that has repeatedly taken me away from truth. The truth is that one act of goodness is better than the whole of ruler-ship. But I realized this only when Death took me in its grip. Most people who are conventionally thought of as successful in this world have died feeling that they were the most unsuccessful of all. If whatever happens to a man when he nears death happened before this, his life