Tilak Amitava Chowdhury

Why do we exist?  There was a time when we existed to live to achieve something. Kings lived for bigger kingdoms where people lived happily and found a way of life better than ever. Scholars lived for discovering something that never existed before...something that made lives beautiful and made life more inclusive and worth living. Warriors fought for defending an ideal or a way of life that they thought true and sacrificed their lives for it. We read about it in the epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata where the great kings and learner men live for an ideal. A way of life that was called sacred. They practiced and prepared for it through personal sacrifices.  Somewhere, something changed. We started living a life of immense power. Power that we only imagined a few centuries back was real and in our hands. We lost the big picture. Everything became about instant gratification atvany cost. Greed became good. We were self obsessed with ourselves. We lost the vision of our forefat...

In my view, the gift of hope is the greatest gift mankind has with it. Every achievement no matter how small starts with this ability of ours - hope. And from hope arises the second gift we have - trust It's a combination of hope and trust that actually runs this world. When we get into a plane and are flying in the air with no safety net whatsoever, hope that we will be safe and the trust that a few of our species namely the engineers and pilots and even the person filling the fuel in the aircraft have done their best. We trust their ability to take care of us. The pilots do the same with pharmacists who design pills that we eat without thinking if we will be alive. Because we hope that we will get well and we trust our fellow humans. Name a profession, and we are bound by an unseen contract of hope and trust with humanity. The army, the farmers, the barbers, the bakers, the teachers, the nurses....the list is endless but yet the hope and trust is what we really buy in return for ...