Life is an enigma. It is next to impossible to say what life has in store for anyone at any given time." On Friday noon, July the twentieth, 1714, the finest bridge in all Peru broke and precipitated five travelers into the gulf below." Why did this bridge, the best in all Peru, break, and why did those five die at that time? Is there a pattern in human life, or a plan in the Universe at all? " Either we live by accident or die by accident " said Thornton Wilder, the great American novelist of the early part of this century, in his book The bridge of San Luis Rey, the classic written in 1927. He also felt that these kind of things that happen in life are unfit for scientific scrutiny, for want of what they call proper control. He goes on to add "Some say we shall never know, and that to the Gods we are like the flies that the boys kill on summer day, on the contrary, that the very sparrows do not lose a feather that has not been brushed away by the fingers of God".

Liberty is a relative word in any given society or civilization, the latter two words being used interchangeably by many thinkers of yore, as for example, Lucien Goldmann, writing in his famous book The Hidden God ( Le Dieu Cache, 1955 ), rightly says that " in every case this view of the world is coloured, if not determined, by social tensions." Fernand Braudel, the famous French historian, says that " the question frequently put to him, by both historians and philosophers, was what becomes of man, his role in history, his freedom of action?" This question is best answered by another thinker of that time, Gertrude Himmelfarb, in 1940, at the height of the"Hitlerian paradox", who said that liberty of every man " is being convulsed by the passions of a single man". Is that not true today in any other society or civilization?

Happiness is living dangerously, was the motto in one of London’s schools. What a scientific statement? It is all in the mind- happiness being a state of the mind, at any given point in time. Pittacus ( Plutarch, De la tranquillite de l’esprit-tranlated. Amyot ) said that every man has his curse: his was his wife’s bad temper; " if it were not for that he would think himself entirely happy". " Seeing that so just, so wise, so valiant, so great a man like Pittacus should feel the whole state of his life corrupted by it, it must indeed be a grievous clog. So what are we to do about it, little men like us?" asks Michel De Montaigne, the great French philosopher in his beautiful classic " The Essays ". While on this topic it is good to get reminded of what Socrates said when he was asked whether it was appropriate to take or not take a wife, he replied " whichever you do you will be sorry". Very true. " Man is God or wolf to man" was very famous proverb. One can make or break one’s happiness. Another reason to be unhappy is the feeling of being not appreciated. It is better to remember that the " most beautiful and most virtuous of deeds are not always the most celebrated ones."

A friend of mine once told me that life is like going out for a drive in a car. If you start with a bad car and flat tyres, you are more likely to meet with an accident, than if you started with a new Mercedez Benz. In real life this does not hold good that way at all. If one is alive and healthy at a given time it is because of chance, and if one has lost a near and dear one unexpectedly, or if one is suffering from a deadly disease at a given time, again it is because of chance, I wrote in my book Holistic Living, some years ago. Many of my colleagues were very angry with me for that remark. However, a recent meta analysis of all the medical data so far collected put into a supercomputer gave the same verdict that chance could not be ruled out as the cause of all the findings reported.

" Doctors have been predicting the unpredictable" all these years was the firm opinion of a great physicist, Professor Firth, of the Strathclyde University in Glasgow. Time evolution does not depend on the partial knowledge of the organism, and even a small change in the initial state could result in dramatic changes as time evolves. This new knowledge in science is called the science of Chaos, and explains all these unexpected things happening around us. All our risk factor hypotheses, and the screening procedures, do not necessarily predict the future correctly and a recent audit did show the futility of many of these expensive procedures. All these procedures, however, have the capacity to make man unhappy because of many false positive tests and the uncertainty of the genuinely positive tests in bringing on the danger in the distant future.This was very well shown by the shopping plaza blood pressure measurements introduced in USA in many places. This resulted in many people being labeled hypertensives and the consequent sick absenteeism that it brought about.The effort has been given up now.

Montaigne was again at his best when he said "considering the frailty of our life and the number of natural hazards to which it is exposed, we should not allow so large a place in it to being born, to leisure and to our apprenticeship-I cannot accept the way we determine the span of our lives". "Men are vain authorities who can resolve nothing" was the firm belief of Socrates himself !

[By what artifice God governs this world, our home; where the moon comes from, where she does go and how she does bring her horns together month after month and grow full; whence the gales spring which rule the salty sea, and what dominion does the south wind enjoy; whence come those waters which are ever in the clouds? is the English translation.] He went on to add that " no knowledge of mine will bring it to change its course; it will not take to different road for my sake. It is madness to wish it so". What a beautiful statement of the truth, which is higher than all our experiences, scientific or otherwise. That was his metaphysics, but looks like modern physics of the non-linear mathematics and chaos.

Life , liberty, and happiness are all in the human mind, the latter is in the driving seat of human destiny to a very great extent. One can make or break his life. One could bring on happiness or depression on oneself at will. If we contemplate on all these, man will stop squandering the sparse resources of this planet. Because of our actions, based may be on scientific assumptions, we have been destroying our planet gradually. Now thinkers all over have been alerted and recently there was a conference about that in London, where it was decided to warn the powers that be about our self destruction, as otherwise by the year 2020 AD, the temperature of this planet is going to go up by 2 degree Celsius, making life miserable for all of us. It is supposed to kill at least 60-80 million people with malaria alone in the West. The sea water will come up by 50 centimeters and that will submerge many of the island nations of the world. The most important culprit in the game is carbon dioxide produced by our burning the fossil fuels. Let me end this article by reminding ourselves of the famous saying of Allan Porter in his good book God’s Fools, " Man with his proclivity for comfort, and his greed, will eventually destroy all the natural resources of this planet- this will happen in all kinds of societies- whether in monarchy, aristocracy, plutocracy, democracy " or what have you.. .