In a overheard brief exchange of pleasantries between two elderly relatives hailing from the same village, both well past their eighties, one of them a dropout in primary school and the other retired for many years after service in the government, the diverse outlook to life (and death) was witnessed. The interaction lasted barely a couple of minutes after the two octogenarians came face-to-face in the lounge of the residence of the dropout, even as the younger members of the latter’s household watched expectantly. The host, not given to indulge in much camaraderie, blurted out chalo, vaikuntaku jaana (Let us depart), seemingly offering himself to be the journeyman of his pal of several decades in the cherished trip to the other world, obviously one way! The instant response he got for his honestly stated plan of taking leave of this mortal world was hard-hitting, namely “He is talking nonsense, let us get out of here!!,” clearly hinting about his unpreparedness to undertake that final one-way trip from here to nowhere. His verdict in answer to the phrase in the play Hamlet by William Shakespeare, namely “To be or not to be, that is the question” was decidedly ‘To be.’

The two true-to-life characters in the aforementioned narrative didn’t live for more than a few months after their brief meeting. The doctors who were attending to their afflictions, much to the relief of their survivors in the family, remarked that one of them died due to age-related health problems and the other due to life-style ailments, in an apparent oversimplification of connect between life and death.

While longevity or short-life of an individual has eluded to be pre-determined so far, life expectancy of a given population in different countries, as an index of its state of wellness (or extending the date of death) is expressed by demographers in numbers even to the first decimal point. In case of India, its people as a whole have reportedly gained nearly a decade of life expectancy since 1990, improving from 59.7 years then to 70.3 years in 2016 for women and from 58.3 years to 66.9 for men. These flattering numbers, in a certain sense, apply to the 1.3 billion headcount of the land like the army uniform which fits everybody in the army in general but nobody in particular. The years that anyone lives beyond the aforementioned calculated figures shall be deemed as a sort of bonus one earns in life in exercising care and caution in the matter of food habits and living conditions.

In the backdrop of the foregoing points relating to life and death, the question of to be or not to be has got overshadowed by many well-marked contributors to shortening of life while pollution (in its widest meaning) and malnutrition are not only conspicuous but also left grossly unaddressed by people at large and administration.