Punjab Notes: Pandemic: hubris makes fragility unbearable.

Sickness however brief changes your relationship not only with the things around but also with your own physical and emotional being. It's invisible but perceptible presence of your end that makes life precious.

Poet Bertolt Brecht puts it very succinctly when he says, 'Almost everyone has loved the world when on him two clods of earth are hurled.' Pain and subsequent helplessness is what one is confronted with when sick.

Baba Farid, the pioneer of Punjabi poetry, had a long life lived to the full. He was a saint of legendary status who could be rightly called 'mahatapassvi'[a great ascetic]. As age caught with him he was filled with anguish: 'Budha hoya shaikh Farid, Kanban laggideh / jay saovarhiyan jiwana, bhi tunnhosikheh [Shaikh Farid has grown old, his body shakes / the body will be reduced into dust even if one lives for full hundred years]'.

He probably composed this couplet when he was in his eighties. It gives us a hint that he suffered from essential tremor or Parkinson's disease and makes him think of brevity of human life. The difference between short and long human life becomes meaningless when juxtaposed against the unending flow of time, immeasurable and unfathomable. He seems to have employed the famous Biblical phrase; dust unto dust. In a unique expression he describes the sense of existential human helplessness when old age and sickness catch with one.' Inhin nikki jan ginthulldongarbhaviaumm / ajj Farida koojra saokko han thiviumm [With these small legs of mine, I have traversed desert and mountains / But today my water bottle appears as if it's hundreds of miles away]'.

Baba Farid has hinted at the psychological dimension of individual's life when its fragility becomes unbearable. He was given to traveling far and wide. He and Baba Guru Nanak are the two toughest men in the modern cultural history of the Punjab. But their physical toughness was proportionate to their empathy.

Baba Farid talked of old age, sickness, fragility of life and human helplessness when confronted with approaching end.

But it is not just old age that makes an individual prone to disease. Extreme emotional stress can debilitate an individual as young as legendry Sahiban, one of the main protagonists of celebrated tale of Sahiban and Mirza. Mirza, Sahiban's cousin, after completion of his studies leaves city of Khiwa on the left bank of the River Chenab for his home town Danabad which is situated away on the right side of the River Ravi. Aftermath...