THE purpose of life raises several important questions such as what is the meaning of life? Why do humans (in general) exist? Do they exist for some purpose? Why does the universe exist?

We have to discover the purpose of life as without that, our life would not be qualitatively different from that of animals. The fate of man and that of beast is the same. As one dies, so dies the other.

Some western philosophers have a different view. For example Bertrand Russell in his essay on “A free man’s worship” observes that “brief and powerless is man’s life. The life of man, viewed outwardly is but a small thing in comparison with the forces of nature. It is a long march through the night surrounded by invisible foes, tortured by weariness and pain towards a goal that few can hope to reach and where none may tarry long. That all the labours of the ages, all the devotion, all the inspirations, all the noonday brightness of human genius, are destined to extinction in the vast death of the solar system and that the whole temple of man’s achievement must inevitably be buried beneath the debris of a universe in ruins.”

The Russell view of the world is the same as that of Jean Paul Sartre and Albert Camus. They also stress that the man’s ideals are his own creations. Similarly, Arthur Schopenhauer believed that life has no meaning as he puts it: “We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness. We end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses. And the road from the one to the other too goes in regard to our well-being and engagement of life, steadily downhill, happily dreaming childhood, exultant youth, toil-filled years of manhood, infirm and often wretched old age, torment of last illness and finally the throes of death.

The Quran at several places spells out the purpose of life. “And we created man and Jinnat to worship us.” “Men serve your Lord, who created you so that you may guard against evil”: and “continue to worship Him till your death”. “Give glory to your lord before sunrise and before sunset. Praise him, night and day, so that you may find comfort.” (Sura Al-Baqra, Al-Araf, Al-Muzammal, Taha etc.).

The purpose of life can be understood only if one has faith in God Almighty. Sura Baqra explains the message of the Quran: “This Book is not to be doubted. It is a guide for the righteous who have faith in the unseen and who firmly believe in the life to come.” Thus, faith or belief in God is the prerequisite for moulding one’s life according to the purpose set out in the Quran.

The purpose is not merely confined to worship Him. The Quran itself elaborates further. “It is not righteousness that you turn your faces towards the east and the west but righteous is the one who believes in Allah and the last day and the angels and the Book and the prophets and gives away wealth out of love for him to the near of kin and the orphans and the needy and the wayfarers and to those who ask and set slaves free and keeps up prayer and pays the poor rate and the performances of their promise when they make a promise and the patient in distress and affliction and in the time of conflict, These are they who are truthful and these are they who keep their duty.”

Thus a code of conduct is prescribed for fulfilling the purpose desirable in the Quran.

Man has been endowed with the power of thought, the knowledge of good and evil. Therefore, God will judge the man whether he has obeyed the code of conduct prescribed in the Quran. The Quran says “We shall test your steadfastness with fear and famine, with loss of life and property and crops.” And for those who have followed His commands, the Quran says “We shall not deny them their reward...”

What will be the fate of those who disbelieve or disobey the purpose described above? “For the wrongdoers we have prepared a fire which will encompass them like the walls of pavilion. When they cry out for help they shall be showered with water as hot as molten brass, which will scald their faces. Evil shall be their drink, dismal their resting place.” (Sura Al Kahf). The reward and punishment would be pronounced on the Day of Judgment.

The universe though created by God has also a purpose co-related with a Quranic purpose. The universe is made subservient to mankind. The Quran mentions: “Allah is He who created the heavens and the earth and sent down waters from the clouds, then brought forth with its fruits as a sustenance for you and He has made the ships subservient to you to run their course in the sea by His command, and He has made the rivers subservient to you. And he has made subservient to you the sun and the moon, pursuing their courses and He has made subservient to you the night and the day.”

Thus the universe without a purpose has no meaning and such a universe would thus be a cosmic accident, a chance explosion thrust into existence for no reason. The most important link with the Quranic purpose is the faith in God Almighty as without faith, life itself is absurd.

If there is no faith in God, then, there can be no objective standard of right and wrong. Who is to say which values are right and which one wrong? Without faith, good and evil do not exist.

AFTER about five months of acrimonious procrastination during which India and Pakistan held each other responsible for the lack of progress in the Indian prime minister’s bid for peace in the region, the prospects of any meaningful contacts between the two countries have all but evaporated. For the present there would perhaps be nothing but statements from each side apportioning blame.

There has been speculation for some time that New Delhi would not hold any purposeful dialogue with Pakistan until after its general elections which are due next year. If Mr Atal Behari Vajpayee returns to power and frees himself of the pressure of the fundamentalists who are at present part of his coalition, he may make a serious bid for a dialogue with Pakistan.

If, on the other hand, he fails and the other major rival political party in India, the Congress under Ms Sonia Gandhi’s leadership, wins, it would not be in a strong enough position to start a meaningful process of peace with Pakistan. It thus seems realistic to assume that if the peace process has to await the outcome of India’s next general elections, it might as well be forgotten.

Pakistan’s official spokesman at his recent briefing avoided speculating on why India which had in fact called for a resumption of the bilateral talks had cooled off. He maintained that Islamabad continued to believe that there could be no progress in bilateral relations with India without a dialogue being resumed.

Ominously coinciding with Pakistan’s admission of a stalemate in the prospects of a dialogue, reports from New Delhi spoke of the Indian government proposing to build nuclear-proof bunkers in selected locations “to protect the top leaders” in the case of an atomic strike. Assuming the reports are correct, surely India should know that in the event of a nuclear strike it is not the “top leaders” who would necessarily be the target. The greater likelihood is that it would be the masses who would suffer.

It is depressing to think that all the recent exchanges of large groups of people, representing cross-sections of the citizens, and their spontaneous expression of goodwill were nothing but an exercise in futility. Indeed, the eminent peace activist and journalist Kuldip Nayar from New Delhi promised to bring several hundred of his compatriots belonging to all classes and all sections of society to Pakistan to interact with the Pakistani people. It is doubtful that with the chance of any sort of detente being ruled out for the time being he would be able to go ahead with his programme.

While stressing that it is India which stands in the way of a meaningful progress in the proposed bilateral contacts, a Pakistani spokesman said that the UN had to play a more active role in resolving the Kashmir dispute. This may, however, be no more than mere wishful thinking.

The fact is that the UN has virtually kept itself out of the dispute since its original involvement in the Kashmir problem in the 1950s. Since then its involvement has been minimal. Even the patrolling of the ceasefire line has all but ceased mainly because of India’s instransigence.

It is difficult to visualize that after consolidating its position in the Occupied Kashmir, India would agree to any UN or other outside involvement. Over the years the world powers, specially the permanent members of the UNSC, have stopped being concerned about the Kashmir dispute. In any case, India would strongly oppose any such move.

India also perhaps remembers only too well that its original decision to involve the UN in 1948 had been virtually disastrous for it. It had hoped that the world body would promptly tell Pakistan to stop meddling in Kashmir which India regarded as its territory.

Numerous rounds of India-Pakistan talks have been held but the dispute is not nearer to being resolved. It is difficult to understand how Pakistan could persuade the UN to play a more active role in getting the dispute resolved or even in getting India to sit at the negotiating table with Pakistan. The world body may have played “a more proactive role” in many other areas. But it has achieved very little success in issues such as Palestine, Iraq and Afghanistan.

We need to remind ourselves that India today is recognized as a major regional power and has the strategic support of the US and perhaps many other world powers. On the other hand, Pakistan, despite the positive role it is playing in bringing peace to Afghanistan, has no comparable clout.

As the situation stands today, the Kashmir issue seems intractable. However, sooner or later India and Pakistan have to be persuaded to sit down together at the negotiating table, with the determination that they would not give up until such time as a way out of the Kashmir impasse has been found.

The well known Indian scholar Sumantra Bose, who has been consistently critical of New Delhi’s policy about Kashmir’s future and unreservedly

supportive of the Kashmiri people’s demand for self-determination, has come to the conclusion that “the Indian state is incomparably more tenacious

and ruthless than Kashmir’s klashnikov-wielding militants.”

Bose believes that India will not relinquish its hold over any part of Kashmir and the ‘militants’ cannot force it to do so. There is no option but to involve Kashmiri patriots in the monumentally complex task of tripartite negotiations, predicated on the existence among Kashmiris of “something called Kashmiri patriotism, deeply rooted in ‘Kashmiriyat‘.

The US with its newly established strategic alliance with India should get the Indian leaders to agree to such a discourse (Pakistan will of course not refuse) if peace is to be preserved in South Asia.

IF Europe and the rest of the world want to save the UN as an institution that counts and Iraq from the disintegration that confronts it they must let the U.S. back into the UN — and into the driver’s seat. As Dag Hammarskjvld, the UN’s most revered ex-secretary general, once said, the UN was created not to get us to heaven but to save us from hell.

It is tempting — and I have been very tempted — to let the U.S. and Britain stew in their own mess in Iraq. They created this pickle and for a few months it has seemed right to let them soak in it, so that next time they might more openly listen to those many critics who warned them that war would probably end up, as it has, creating a worse situation that the one that existed before.

But the price of letting the mess run its course, as is now becoming apparent, is to see the likelihood of Al Qaeda extending its reach into a nose-to-nose confrontation with America, and the intensity of animosity from the Islamic world, already at a high pitch, becoming even more hate-filled and irrational, beyond the ability of leaders, whether elected or imposed, to contain. President George Bush and Prime Minister Tony Blair have made Iraq the biggest threat to world peace since the Cuban missile crisis.

This is the crime that Bush and Blair must be made to pay for, the former in a general election, the latter more likely by a revolt in his party. But meanwhile the rest of us have the responsibility to support the recent change of heart in Washington that suggests that the U.S. is now ready to internationalize under the authority of the Security Council the responsibility for pacifying and rebuilding Iraq.

The UN as an institution has come out of the Iraq war with its head held high. It didn’t compromise its principles based on its Charter as it did at the time of the misguided Kosovo adventure. Moreover, even in its darkest moments, it kept its popular support — all along the American and British people told pollsters they would have preferred UN backing for their governments’ decision to go to war with Iraq if it could be obtained, which set them apart from Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Vice-President Dick Cheney and probably Bush himself, who seemed to be seized with an instinctive abhorrence of the UN.

The Iraq debate at the UN, which Secretary of State Colin Powell convinced Bush was necessary even though it appears the decision to go to war had been taken some months before, made other nations, particularly those who held rotating seats on the Security Council, realize how important the UN was to them. It made Mexico and Canada, the U.S.’s near neighbours and most important trading partners, conclude that there are some overriding matters that simply push aside economic self-interest. It made the Africans,who held 20% of the votes on the Security Council and who desperately need more American aid and trade benefits, decide that on some critical issues principles and judgment had to come first.

In fact the continued and feverish debate at the UN managed to delay war by many months. It also gave time for anybody who could read a newspaper, even the more conservative ones, to become aware that Washington and London had only a paucity of evidence to prove that Iraq was the threat they said it was and that the then supposed connections with Al Qaeda were tenuous at best. (Nothing that has come out since has added much to what was pretty well known before.)

It didn’t stop the war but it educated masses of people- many of whom turned out on the streets of America, if not as in as many numbers as in the rest of the world- that war is rarely a solution to intractable political problems and we should learn to be smart enough to find alternative ways of dealing with what appear to be insuperable difficulties. — Copyright

PEOPLE ask me if I have ever met Richard Grasso, the former chairman of the New York Stock Exchange, who was just forced to resign. I can say I have. I am not his lifelong friend — I met him just once. But it was an occasion I’ll always remember.

During the celebration of the Millennium, people were asked to come down to the Stock Exchange to ring the bell at the beginning and end of the trading day.

I still don’t know why Grasso invited me. I wasn’t a heavy hitter. I wasn’t related to a heavy hitter and I didn’t know a bull from a Dow.

I also didn’t know who Grasso was, except that at 9 and 4 he appeared on television and stood by the chosen bell ringers and cheered them on.

I accepted the invitation before Grasso realized he had made a mistake. Some of my friends thought I was making it up. One said, “If it’s true, I’m going to get out of the market and put my money under the mattress.”

When my family heard about it, they said this would be a chance for me to get inside information, which I could pass on to them.

So I wouldn’t look ignorant, I read up on the stock market. I read about J.P. Morgan, Andrew Carnegie and Ivan Boesky. I found out what a put was, what a hedge fund was, and that people who were nervous about their money could put in it the Cayman Islands.

The big day came — Dec. 15,1999. I was supposed to close the market that afternoon. My entire family was there. I met Grasso for the first time. He didn’t look at all like a man worth $140 million.

I remember at the time thinking that was a lot of money for someone just to ring a bell.

He said, “You look nervous.”

“Why shouldn’t I be?” I asked. “If I ring the bell and the Dow goes down, everyone will hate me.”

“The bears won’t. They make money if the market drops. The people on the floor make money no matter what happens.”

“Why do they keep yelling at each other?” I asked him.

“The houses with seats on the floor lock up their guys in cages at night and in the morning they go at each other again.”

I noticed Grasso was just having fun with me.

At five minutes to 4, we walked out on the Stock Exchange balcony. I waved my hand just like Mussolini used to.

I held the bell, and at a signal from Grasso I started to ring it. The market had gone way up and there was a loud cheer from those on the floor. I was a hero.

I wouldn’t have mentioned this except for all the press Grasso is getting. He negotiated a $140 million pay package that people thought was obscene.

I thought about my visit to the Exchange the other day when I read about Grasso’s resignation and I sent him an e-mail: “Never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee.”

He never replied.—Dawn/Tribune Media Services