To Which Country Have You Gone

In October 2011 several famous people died. Ralph Steinman, from Canada, died on the 13th of the month, at the age of 68. He was to receive the Nobel Prize for Medicine but just three days before he could be informed about the award he passed away. US computer giant Steve Jobs died on the 6th of October, aged 56. He had been the Chief Executive of the American company ‘Apple’ and introduced the world to the iPhone and the iPod. He died just a month after Apple launched its new iPhone 4-S model. The famous Indian singer Jagjit Singh, known as the ‘King of Ghazal’, died on 10th October, when he was at the peak of his career. He was 70. His son had died in an accident, after which he had sung these lines, which applied also to himself after his own death:

Chitthi na koi sandesh
Janey voh kaunsa desh
Jahan tum chaley gaye
(No letter, no message:
I don’t know which is the country
To which you have gone.)

Every day, across the world thousands of people die. This event is an alarm for everyone else. It tells us that we are destined to spend only a very limited period here in this world. Then, we shall die, after which we will all go back to our Creator, where we will receive His decision about our eternal future.

Given this, the foremost thing each one of us needs to do is to learn why God created us. We need to understand what the Creator’s creation plan is and then spend our life here in line with it, so that in the next world, after death, we can hope to obtain the Creator’s reward—that is, the reward of eternal Paradise.