“What lives that does not live from the death of someone else?”
This is a profound statement. The lone truth of the living. This statement is found in the initial credits of a 1980s German movie “NEKROMANTIK” which was banned at that time. The director wanted to create a stunning paralytic and unforgettable experience through this movie, but ended up giving exactly the opposite. Watching this movie makes you pity the creative senses of the director. This is simply a movie that can be easily forgotten without a thought.
What, however, caught my attention was the statement – ‘What lives that does not live from the death of someone else?’ This statement wants to convey that – every living thing depends, for its life, on the death of others for its survival. In other words, every living being will have to either kill others for its survival or get killed for the survival of others. There is no other option. This world survives on this principle alone. In this way one death is the survival of many.
It may be noted that we are talking of death. We are not discussing about killing, for killing is one of the methods of death. Killing brings about the final result i.e., death. In this profound statement, reference is being made to death. Killing is one of the many methods of achieving the target called death.
Death has infinite faces. We get to see few of its faces in our lifetime. Death arrives every time with a different face. Why do we die? I think I can answer this question. We die so that other will live. This is the purpose of death, perhaps. Death is a process, often it is a lifetime process. Death appears sudden, and it is never sudden sir.
Whatever that lives will do so only from the death of others. If there is no death, then there is no life. Death is the food for life. The concepts of vegetarian, non-vegetarian etc. are only peripheral. At the bottom of vegetarian or non-vegetarian, there is the death of other living organisms. Hence, these distinctions are meaningless. The death of one civilization gives rise to another. All that lives can only live on the death of others. Life is death!
Dr. K. Raja Gopal Reddy is a seasoned internationally qualified Insurance professional. What you are reading here, may not answer all the questions we have, but has the absolute power of asking unsettling questions which increase the interest in the strange world, and show the contradictory wonders lying just below the surface of the commonest things of life. Look at this disturbing but beautiful thought of Friedrich Nietzsche “God is dead. God remains dead. And we have killed him”.
Dr. Reddy can be reached at: raja66gopal@gmail.com
