Pleasant Beginning,
Painful End

In this world everyone works hard to make money, only to give easy money to his unworthy children and then leave the world one day. He takes nothing to his grave but his good deeds.

A certain Muslim of my acquaintance worked very hard at his education, and acquired a law degree from a well-known college. Next, he passed the course of chartered accountancy with distinction. Soon he got a very good job of chief accountant in an Arab country; there he made a lot of money. He later came back to his own country, where he began working as a builder in a big city. He earned a lot of money and bought several properties. In the words of the Quran, he was engaged totally with amassing wealth, but at the age of 65 he died all of a sudden. He left the world empty handed. On hearing his story, I thought that in present times this is more or less true of everyone. In this world everyone has a hard life, makes money, only so that he may give easy money to his unworthy children and then leave the world one day.

This is like a painful end to a pleasant beginning. Everyone more or less has the same story to tell. Literate or illiterate, religious or irreligious, almost everyone apparently regards himself as successful, but death brings this lesson to all, that everyone is a deprived person. This state of affairs is the tale of ‘from success to deprivation.’ This painful situation continues because the dead never come back to this world, to make people aware of the reality of death and life. After death man becomes aware of this reality but this aware man never comes back to the world. The living man is unaware of the reality and this unaware man cannot discover the reality by asking about it from the dead. Human history is another name for this double-sided deprivation.