All the World is a Stage…

What is life, and where are we going? This question has haunted human beings ever since they learnt to ‘think’. The great poet and playwright, William Shakespeare suggested that we are mere actors, and perform the roles assigned to us. In “As You Like It” this appears in the form of a monologue. The analogy proved so powerful that this has become a much quoted metaphor. In fact this play owes its popularity to this dialogue delivered by the actor when he is alone on the stage. The bard goes on to divide life into seven stages, and suggests that human life is composed of the following phases:

• Infancy: In this stage he is a helpless baby and knows little.

• Childhood: He begins to go to school and is unwilling to leave the protected environment of his home as he is still not confident.

• The lover: In this stage he is always remorseful due to some reason or other, especially the loss of love. He tries to express feelings through song or poetry.

• The soldier: It is in this age that he thinks less of himself and more of others. He is very easily aroused and is hot headed. He is forever seeking a reputation for himself and gaining recognition, even at the cost of his own life.

• The justice: In this stage he has acquired wisdom through the many experiences he has had in life. He has reached a stage where he has gained prosperity and social status. He becomes very attentive of his  looks and begins to enjoy the finer things of life.

• Old Age: He begins to lose his charm — both physical and mental. He becomes the butt of others’ jokes. He loses his firmness and assertiveness, and shrinks in stature.

• Extreme old age: It is a second childhood, he is again helpless and no one takes him seriously in this phase of life.

For  those who like  Shakespeare’s language, the piece lifted straight out of the Play is reproduced below:

All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players: They have their exits and their entrances;
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms. And then the whining school-boy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honour, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slipper’d pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side,
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Is All the World Really a Stage?

Many years ago, while we were discussing this phrase in the house of Dr PN Shankar in Bengluru, his erudite father who had lost his eyesight, looked penetratingly towards me with his sightless eyes, and asked,

“If all the world is a stage, then where is the audience? Has a play been ever performed without public anywhere in the world?”

The question floored us, and since then, I have drawn curtains on this parable. It raises more questions than any which it may have answered! The stage was as it was, when the play began, and also on how it looked after the end of the show.

 

Part Two : An alternative Approach

Mystics and thinkers have described life as ‘Maya’ which in English may mean an illusion or falsehood. Some Masters have described it as a dream. And there they all agreed that it is not static. Change is the only thing that is permanent. One day, when I was contemplating on the immortality of the soul, it occurred to me that human life is a lot like a river. Rivulets emerge in the mountains out of small orifices which look like wombs. Before the birth of  a river, there is a long ’gestation’ Clouds form over the oceans, and they travel towards the mountains. The snow and the rain accumulates in the mountains, and it emerges when the time comes. I have seen the origin of several rivers. The one at ‘Gomukh’ is perhaps the most picturesque.

A picture of ‘Gangotri’ The start of the Ganges  

Phase two : The meandering Stage

In this part of the journey, the rivulet meanders through the mountains. It gurgles, and roars. Its pristine water rarely travels straight. It twists and turns much like a playful infant. The human child does a similar thing…it goes about exploring the house in what looks like an aimless running around. During this period, the rivulet is joined by several other streams, and they join up; just like children make friends to play. Their individual identities are lost and they move like a group of friends.

We see three rivulets merging into one, like friends!

Phase Three. The Joy of Falling. 

The rivulet is like a child. Falling is a part of the game…and the adventurous children do the same. They dare not try it later, when they are grown up!

A waterfall in Sikkim

Phase Four. Urge for Freedom, and Spreading the Wings

At around this time, the rivulet wants to ‘grow up’. It seeks space to fan out. That is just like a young person wanting to leave home, and go out into the world. This happens when the rivulet emerges out of the mountains. It suddenly expands on both its banks.  I once had an opportunity to fly out of Sikkim over the Teesta on a helicopter. When we reached just beyond the ‘Teesta Bridge’ I saw the rivulet enlarging in both directions. It was like school children graduating out and going in all directions in search of careers. Two pictures tell the tale.

 The Teesta, just out of the mountain 

Teesta in plains. In mountains, it was a few meters wide, it now measures a mile between the banks! 

Phase Five : The River Grows up…

So far, the water of the river was pristine clean. But as it grows up, the burden of the society begins to tell on it. It gathers filth and stench. The child does the same. Evil influences begin to pollute his personality. He loses his godliness, and becomes vile and detestable. In the good old days, some rivers were known as ‘rivers of sorrow’. The most notorious on this count was “the Yellow River” (known there as Huang He) of China  It was called by that name because it bought a lot of silt with it, and whenever the silt became high enough, the river used to change its course, flooding huge areas. As of now, most rivers in Asia are rivers of sorrow. The untreated sewer waters and affluent from industry combined with plastic wastes thrown in the water have made their water unfit for aquaculture and even irrigation. The holy bath in the Ganges does not cleanse the pilgrims any more. It may ‘wash’ their sins away, but it is no longer a joy. Masses of people are driven by faith and habit, to go for their ‘sewer snana’ It is much the same with human beings. As they grow up, and rise to positions of power and authority, they bring sorrow and pain to their fellow beings.

A ‘snana’ in a Holy Sewer

Phase Six : End of the Journey

Towards the end, there is very little ‘current’ left in the water. It no longer makes any new friends, and just like an elderly person, it moves to its ultimate destination, with a sense of resignation. The river, as also the old man has very little to offer. All it can do is to bear the burden of the environment and amble along its path. When it reaches the ocean, the situation is very interesting. When the tide is high, the sea water flows into the river, and when it is low, the river ‘flows’ into the salty waters. And here the river loses its identity and the name. Death of the human being is similar. At the fag end the line between ‘life’ and death’ becomes faint. I have seen some very frail people on their death beds looking like copses. And the end is more of a relief than a tragedy.

A file picture of the Hooghly, where the long journey ends  

Phase Seven : The Inevitable End

And then when the waters merge with the ocean, a phenomenon just like that of human rebirth begins. When Sun shines strong, it converts the ocean water into clouds, and some clouds are able to move back to the mountains. And that is just like the soul. It has been truly observed that the ‘soul’ does not ‘die’ It merely changes its form. And therefore, the water of, sat the Ganges, might appear in the form of Narbada or Kaveri in the next cycle.

One More Similarity Between the River and Life

The similarity does not end here. In an idle reverie, I discovered that most of the water on the earth is in the oceans. Only an insignificant part is in the rivers. In the same way, the human beings are just a tiny speck when compared with the Creator. For those, who like figures, I am giving below a table which shows the distribution of water on the Earth. My calculations revealed that if the water in the oceans is equal to the contents of a standard swimming pool 50 meters x 25 meters, and two meters deep, then the sum total of the water in all the rivers on the earth is no more than two liters! 

Where is Earth’s water located?

For a detailed explanation of where Earth’s water is, look at the data table below. Notice how of the world’s total water supply of about 332.5 million mi³ of water, over 96 percent is saline. And, of the total freshwater, over 68 percent is locked up in ice and glaciers. Another 30 percent of freshwater is in the ground. Rivers are the source of most of the fresh surface water people use, but they only constitute about 300 mi³ (1,250 km³), about 1/10,000^th of one percent of total water.
Note: percentages may not sum to 100 percent due to rounding.

An estimate of global    water distribution
Water source	Water volume, in cubic    miles	Water volume, in cubic    kilometers	Percent of freshwater	Percent of total water
Oceans, Seas, & Bays	321,000,000	1,338,000,000	–	96.54
Ice caps, Glaciers, & Permanent Snow	5,773,000	24,064,000	68.6	1.74
Groundwater	5,614,000	23,400,000	–	1.69
Soil Moisture	3,959	16,500	0.05	0.001
Ground Ice & Permafrost	71,970	300,000	0.86	0.022
Lakes	42,320	176,400	–	0.013
Atmosphere	3,095	12,900	0.04	0.001
Rivers	509	2,120	0.006	0.0002
Source: Igor   Shiklomanov’s chapter “World fresh water resources” in Peter H.   Gleick (editor), 1993, Water in Crisis: A Guide to the World’s Fresh Water   Resources (Oxford University Press, New York). I would not have needed these figures if I had just seen the Globe closely. Look at the Earth with the Pacific ocean in the front. Now remember that, at places, this ocean can go up to ELEVEN kilometers deep. In contrast no river is more than a few meters deep, at the most, and the comparative analysis is not needed!

The Globe from a particular angle. You can hardly see any land!

Denouement 

I started this little story with a quote from William Shakespeare. If I had the strength of his pen, I would have composed a poem on this subject, and for a little while caused a few gullible readers to believe, at least for a little while, that life is just like a river. Actually, there are just a few similarities and the likeness ends there. Human life is far more complex, and interesting. It can neither be compared with any other phenomenon nor understood by the clever devices conjured by mystics and Masters. For one thing, have you ever seen a river or rivulet falling in love with another stream or brook? And of course rivers can not mate to produce another stream!

The bottom line is that life must be lived as it is without trying  to discover either its meaning or identifying other natural phenomena which are similar to ‘life’ There are none. The Bard was clever, and since he was a playwright, he suggested that life is like a play. I was carried away by rivulets during the many years which I spent in the mountains. But the one thing which seems true to me is that just as there are rivers of sorrow, there are men who bring sorrow to mankind. There is a need to clean rivers, as also the men and women who dirty our society.

One of my favorite lyrics was penned by Gulzar sahib. In this, he says that love, which is the highest of all human emotions cannot be defined by a word. He asks you to let the feeling be left ‘nameless’ and manifest as a freewheeling relationship. He urges you to refrain from dividing it between the different forms, and not accuse it of relationships. The song I am referring to is ‘hamne dekhi hai un ankhon ki mehakti khushboo’ A link to it is given below :

A Poem by Col SK Kohli

Rivers Never Return by ‘cols’

the river smoothly does submerge

So should your love emerge as the river of love