Not entirely true.
May be your parents will. They’ll miss you the most. They are getting old. You are the one thing that they look forward to. They will miss you. And may be four of your friends. They’ll miss you. Especially on Saturdays, when they get together. Or at night, when they are expecting your phone call. But eventually they’ll get used to having the fourth chair empty. They’ll get used to the phone not ringing at 23.22 hours. And life will move on, as life does. And then probably a year later,when your Birthday alert pops up on Facebook, some people will think of you. May be feel a little sad as well. But then they would get back to watching IPL Season 5 or How I met your mother re-run.
And then, memories will start to fade away. It will become bleaker and bleaker, till you are extinct from their memories.
That thought scares me. Not the idea of being dead. That’s an eventuality. But the realisation that your existence will cease to exist.
If you die today, then nobody will remember you in a year’s time.
This sort of thought hits you on a Tuesday afternoon, while you are sitting in office, working on an ‘important’ presentation. And then your mind wanders. You think about how all our lives have always been full of ‘grades’ and ‘class tests’ and ‘ppts’ and ‘deliverables’ and ‘deadlines’ and ‘interviews’ and ‘salary’ and you get the point. True, when you were studying for that class test in seventh standard, it did feel like, the world would come to an end if you did not pass it. True, when you were working nights to meet the deadline, it did feel like, your client’s business will come to a standstill, if you don’t have the code up and running by 4 in the morning. True, you thought that meeting target of tampons in Patiala was the only thing that ever mattered in the entire history of the universe. And then what happened? Then, you died of course. Class tests gone. Sales target gone. Presentations gone. Promotions gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Zilch. Nada. Zero. Nobody will mention that you scored the highest marks in the history test in seventh standard, or achieved record sales of tampons in Patiala in February 2011.
If you die today, then nobody will remember you in a year’s time.
This thought could have been the beginning sequence of a movie. A movie about a regular guy, who reaches that stage when people get annoyed beyond endurance and start something and go on to make history. It could have been the moment, when you discover the Tyler Durden in you. When you realise how badly we are stuck in this unending quagmire called mediocrity. It could have been the point where you start to think about your ‘project mayhem’. Think of how you can leave that ‘dent’. Small but unmistakable. A dent which will be your own.
It could have been one of those moments.
