All the World Is a Stage

Learning to act well on the stage of life

- Smt. Sujatha Rao

And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his time plays many parts, His acts being seven ages. William Shakespeare (From "As You Like It")

And then Shakespeare goes on to describe these seven stages, right from being born as an infant "mewling and puking" in the nurse's arms, to fading into oblivion "sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything".

It seems the Bard of Avon exited the stage of life on April 23rd, the same date he entered it 52 years earlier. What can be more befitting to the drama of the life of someone who breathed life into theatrical drama as we know it!

But going by his famous lines quoted above, are we to assume that we are mere puppets playing out a script? But wait a minute, life has no script!

For all the 'sound and fury' with which the character Jaques describes each of these stages in Shakespeare's play "As you like it", he is, in fact, merely describing the seven 'biological' stages of every human being.

In reality, human beings are the director, playwrights and producers of their play. During their infinitesimally brief stay on the tiny dot of this planet Earth, they play out their seven micro cosmically small acts and then vanish.

But these acts happen to be their entire universe, in spite of the fact that they are but a mere speck in the universe. The happy ending, or the sad ending, or any ending, in fact, happens randomly more often. than not, just like the beginning does.