In the last two weeks I have heard of two freak accidents that have snuffed out two ebullient lives. One of a dashing, amiable, flirty journo who believed life is a party and the other, an entrepreneur who made sure people partied hard and got a bit of Goa into their very beings.

The journo was barely 50 and was partying till late Sunday night but didn't wake up on Monday morning. The entrepreneur, all of 37, couldn't keep her Goan hangout open on Oct 2 so was partying at home with close friends, dancing away to glory. One false step, and, reportedly, she went reeling through a skylight and fell to her death.

They both perhaps died just the way they would've wanted to partying till their last breath. But for those of us reading about these freak cases, there's just one refrain: just how uncertain is life, really! Here today, gone tomorrow!

We spend our days at work cribbing, complaining, yelling at colleagues and then take it back home to do the same with the family, never once stopping to think that we might not see these same living, breathing, talking ones the next day. We just take everyone around us for granted.

Call me philosophical today, but it has set me thinking about what life really is about these days? Is it about grabbing every opportunity that comes your way now and living life to the lees? Or is it about building a secure future for yourself and the generations to come? Actually, I can delete the last thought. It belongs to our parents' generation that was solely concerned about the future. Most of our generation is out to make that quick, fast buck, blow away all their earnings at a mall, or on the stock market and then all's well with life. It's only when something like a recession hits them, they know where the shoe pinches.

Life for most of us these days is best negotiated through a shortcut. Even if that shortcut is a stairway to heaven that lands you knock, knock, knocking on heaven's door!

We hardly ever waste time in findingu00a0 or creating ourselves, in delving deep within, figuring out what we really want out of life. Such existentialist theories are for the weak minded, and to be sneered at. Life these days is more about the here and now, in freezing those irrevocable moments of joy and happiness. It's about unsteady relationships, broken marriages, one night stands, dishonest ways to squeeze out the most. It's about the fast and the furious ways to live life up, king size.u00a0 For, you do not know what it holds for you tomorrow.

None can escape death. But Buddhism views death as 'a period of rest, like sleep, by which life regains energy and prepares for new cycles of living.'u00a0 To some, it's even an adventure that they take head-on. An awareness of death can help us live for the moment more purposefully. So, with that twinkle of hope in our eyes, we would, like Hamlet, want to say: 'You cannot, sir, take from me anything that I will more willingly part withal except my life except my life except my life.'