Of late the temperature has dipped drastically which has crippled the lives of the people all over the nation. Especially the poor and the elderly are at the receiving end of the cold spell.

Meanwhile it is disheartening to hear the news of people dying due to cold. To be precise, the ones dying of cold are the people who don’t get things to keep themselves warm during cold as it is very difficult for them to afford them for the whole family. At this critical juncture it has now become the utmost priority of the government to save people from dying due to cold.

The government should be serious about securing the precious lives of the people before anything else. The government and elected officials can at least provide warm clothes and firewood to the needy so they can protect themselves from the cold spell.

Rupak Raj Khanal, Bhaktapur

Eternal unseen

St Paul had said, “We fix our eyes not on what is seen, but on what is unseen; for what is seen is temporary, but what is unseen is eternal.”

Spirituality apart, this holds good in many of our day-to-day activities. At the time of buying something, say a mango, we try to see the unseen like the colour of its pulp which is not readily visible. But in life, this “colour” of the unseen is never visible and that is what we constantly try to see. The same thing happens when we look at our friends to guess their mood and reaction, which may not be manifested in their words or even in their body language. With a stethoscope and other apparatus, a doctor always tries to check the unseen heartbeat, stomach and blood circulation of a patient.

We take more interest in our unseen future than in seen present. We enjoy music that transcends us beyond of what can be seen. When we fix our eyes to a photograph or a historical building, we try to visualise the unseen past in it. Pieces of art and poetry appeal to us as they often have some hidden meaning in it. It is the eternal child in us that always loves to play hide and seek to get the joy of finding the unknown.

We feel that time, space and even numbers are infinite and they all are in unison with the One, the omnipresent. So, the quest for infinity challenges our finite and segregated entity. How long can the unlimited be limited to falsehood? Our inner voice tells us to explore the eternal unseen, which is nothing but the beauty of the infinity — a joy forever.  When a teacher of Albert Einstein had said that the existence of evil nullified the existence of God, Einstein refuted him by comparing evil with darkness. The logic is clear and simple.

As darkness merely being the absence of light, it does not exist on its own.  So is evil, which is nothing but absence of God. Sri Aurobindo had said in The Life Divine, “Therefore the relation of truth to falsehood, of good to evil is not a mutual dependence, but is in the nature of a contradiction as of light and shadow; a shadow depends on light for its existence, but light does not depend for its existence on the shadow.”

Sujit De, Kolkata