IMPERMANENCE

 

Pic Taken at Pashupati Arya Ghat, Kathmandu, Nepal.

“Up to the doorway, kin will walk with you.

Up to the street, your wife will stand beside you.

Up to the graveyard, children will follow in tears.

But at the final step, who is left with you?

 

Dance as long as you can dance,

Speak as long as words will carry.

Gather wealth, gather friends,

But none will travel past the fire.

 

For the cradle, there is the mother’s care,

For the bed, there is the maiden’s love.

For hunger, there is food,

For sorrow, there is wisdom.

 

Ask the one who has left this world,

He will call you to follow.

Ask the one who has just arrived,

He will beg you to stay.

 

The body will fall, the soul will slip away,

The flame will rise, ashes will scatter,

And what remains?

Only silence,

Teaching us what endures, nothing but truth.”

(Translated from Kavignar Kannadasan’s Veedu Varai Uravu-1962)

 

Kannadasan’s “Veedu Varai Uruvu” is not just a song, it is a mirror held up to life’s impermanence. Written for the film Paadha Kaanikkai, the lyric glimmers with the wisdom of Advaita Vedanta philosophy, echoing the truths of detachment and mortality that have shaped centuries of thought. What lends the song its quiet power is its unflinching honesty, family, friends, wealth, and possessions accompany us only so far, and no further. They walk beside us to the doorstep, to the street, perhaps even to the cremation ground but when the final threshold is reached, we are left alone. This stark recognition punctures the illusions we wrap ourselves in, the illusions that relationships and riches can shield us from the inevitable.

Yet Kannadasan, in his genius, does not plunge the listener into despair. Instead, he offers a wider lens. He speaks of the cycles of existence, birth, nurture, desire, and finally, the wisdom that mortality affords. The song is not a lament but a call, to live clearly, to live wisely, and to remember that truth alone outlasts the pageant of life. In this way, impermanence becomes not a shadow, but a lantern.

The resonance of these words was felt with chilling force during the COVID-19 pandemic. Suddenly, mortality was no longer an abstraction reserved for philosophy or poetry. It was intimate, palpable, threaded through the air we breathe. Streets fell silent, hospitals overflowed, and the news became a litany of loss. For a fleeting moment, humanity seemed awakened to impermanence. We saw, perhaps more starkly than ever before, how fragile life is, how thin the veil of certainty really was. And yet, as swiftly as this awareness descended, it evaporated. Like morning dew dissolving under the sun, the clarity faded. Greed returned, ego reclaimed its throne, and the world rushed back into the arms of acquisition and pride, as though nothing had been learned.

The larger world tells the same story, only on a grander stage. A World Bank study now lists 39 fragile and conflict-affected countries that have been driven into deeper turmoil since 2020, where it is witnessing economies collapsing, violence rising, humanitarian crises swelling. The Peace Research Institute (Oslo) reports that battlefield deaths have reached a 30 year high, spurred by wars that escalated or reignited in the wake of the pandemic. What could have been a moment of global reckoning instead became  a return to old appetites, power, possession, and domination.

Into this fragile landscape, step leaders who amplify denial rather than humility. When Donald Trump declares that climate change is a hoax, or sneers that Europe is “going to hell,” it is not simply bluster, it is the voice of a culture unwilling to confront impermanence. His words echo the very pride and carelessness Kannadasan warned against, and the fact that such rhetoric carries weight in the world’s largest economy speaks to the perilous path humanity treads.

And still, even with more international institutions than at any point in history, bodies designed to safeguard peace, health, and justice, the world remains more fragmented than ever. These institutions, too, fall prey to self-interest, each absorbed in its own orbit, each chasing narrow agendas. The irony is striking. Humanity has never had more mechanisms for unity, yet it has rarely felt more divided.

Can it be otherwise? Perhaps. But only if we allow impermanence to be more than an idea. If we see it not as a gloomy shadow but as the absolute truth on which all else rests. To live with this awareness is to strip life of its vanities, to loosen the grip of greed and ego, to seek instead what endures beyond death’s boundary: compassion, wisdom, and clarity.

Kannadasan’s lyrics, in its gentle cadence, whispers what our times demand in a thunderous voice, all that we cling to will dissolve, but in embracing this truth, we may finally learn how to live. Like a river returning to the sea, our journey is not one of loss but of return, of flowing back to the source from which we came, carrying nothing but the wisdom of having passed through the world with open eyes.

What we may lose is borrowed time, but instead we will gain the clarity of return.

Cheers.

 

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