Death & After (A manual on funeral and post-funeral obesequies)

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Introduction

Death, of which every one is aware of is a certain and inevitable event to happen to every living creature. It is however, the most feared and dreaded event. To the dying, it is a mental state of losing all the worldly possessions which is very difficult to compromise with. Added to it in certain instances, it is the agony of living on the last phase of life-a motionless and powerless mass of flesh. Once the last spark of life leaves the body, the degenerating process becomes accelerated and it has to be disposed off at the earliest.

Renowned sage Bouddhayana says that "death is inevitable in the case of man is born .... a creature comes from the unknown and goes to the unknown; so the wise regard birth and death as equal. Such being the fact, people give their dues to their mother, father, preceptor, wife, son, disciples .... and consecrate their cremation with proper sacrament".

Hindu scriptures have prescribed 40 Samskaras for the humans, from conception to cremation, with several milestones called consecrations at various stages of life. Of these the last samskara known as Anthyeshti, performed after one's death by the survivors with mixed feeling of love and dread of the departed for future good and spiritual felicity is the most elaborate. The gravity of death, the consolation by the survivors, the need of compromising with death as natural end of one's existence on earth, the necessity of doing away with the corpse ... all these have contributed to the evolution of the Anthyeshti ceremonies. The Garuda Purana gives a graphic account and explanation for this ritual.

In days of yore, when the community was agro based and hierarchical, with lots of time for oneself as well as for the welfare of community, these rituals were performed and observed in an elaborate manner. But with the flow of time and the community becoming cyber based and scattered globally and every one measuring time in terms of earnings per minute, the procedures have undergone radical changes ... Yet interestingly the base line remains unaltered, It is in this context that Dharmishta Mithran a Mumbai based NGO has volunteered to be the torch bearer of carrying this age old practice with sufficient re- engineering to suit present day trends and has taken upon itself the noble task of helping the people on funeral and post funeral rites.