50 or 100 years of life expectancy! Which would u choose?

Moments of epiphany or insight often stare into our face when least expected. The most mundane of rituals or the most absurd of chores may become the most enlightening instant of our life. What could one possibly realise or visualise while standing in a maddeningly long queue in an ATM. I for one was taken aback by the happenings I witnessed.

I was in a hurry to get some money out of my account and blow it away even faster but was stuck in a lousy queue outside an ATM. I endured the passing minutes ogling the girl who was standing in front of me. She however had the annoying tendency to not face me when standing before me in a queue. I had hardly realised how stupid my frustration was when I noticed an old man hovering outside the shop next to the ATM. This was a shop that sold stuff for new born babies. Actually this was a shop that pandered to newly made mothers who bought absurdly expensive stuff to equip babies which did nothing but puke or piss on all this indulgence. The old-timer tried to get a couple of coins from the baby shop owner who very professionally threw the old-timer out. The shop next to the baby shop was incongruously a liquor shop and a very seedy one at that. It was awfully crowded even though it was monday night and the crowd was determined it seems, to drink till dawn. The old man went into the crowd and started begging among the boisterous and sometimes rowdy crowd. I was laughing internally about the old man's stupidity in begging from a most probably insensitive and drunk crowd. The old man proceeded to pick up 5 and 10 Rs from most of the crowd and probably had a couple of hundred rupees when he exited the liquor shop.

A seedy liquor shop that caters to daily wage labourers and people of mostly lesser means is not exactly a happy hunting ground for beggars. What made those early evening revellers dig into their meagre earnings and give a decent percentage of their earnings to that old man. At any other time the only collection that the old-timer would have made from this crowd would have been one of swear words.The only common factor that connected all the people there, seemed to be the spirits that had possessed their consciousness. Some would have felt the prick of their conscience, some would have felt the stirrings of their dormant emotions that form the basis of sympathy. If people were destined to be more sympathetic and more human in sentiment only when they are drunk then mankind deserves to be drunk all the time. What if drinking kills you by the time you are 50? I for one would say living 50 years as a good human being is better than living a 100 as a self-centered parasite.