Two days ago, I went to a funeral.

Rao Shahnawaz Khan - my mother’s cousin. Somewhere in his seventies. Throat cancer. He never married, had no children. At the funeral, people shared bits and pieces of his life. I used to be scared of him as a kid - he had that kind of personality - but he was gentle at heart. I remember how deeply he cared for a cat he had.

After the prayers, some of his brothers were already positioning for the property he left behind.

I stood there thinking: what will I leave behind that would make people fight over?

I’m 32 years old. Born August 24, 1993.

But lately I’ve been wondering - what is my age, really?

There’s a film called The Man from Earth where a professor claims to be 14,000 years old. He’s lived through history - walked with the Buddha, sailed with Columbus, befriended Van Gogh. His colleagues don’t believe him, but they can’t disprove him either. He’s accumulated millennia of firsthand experience.1

I’m not 14,000 years old. But I’ve been thinking: what if age isn’t just years lived? What if it’s also years absorbed - from lives you’ve studied deeply enough to learn from?

By that measure, I might be 300.

Don’t the old texts say people lived that long in the ancient ages?2

Here’s the rough math.

Aaron Swartz died at 26. Alan Turing at 41. Srinivasa Ramanujan at 32. Évariste Galois at 20. Ted Kaczynski’s mind was lost by 30. Swami Vivekananda at 39. Chris McCandless at 24. My father at 48.

If I’ve truly learned from their lives - absorbed their mistakes, their brilliance, their warnings - then some part of their years lives in me.

Add them up. It’s not actually 300. But it feels like 300. The weight of it does.

Khudi and its collapse

I wrote recently about Iqbal’s philosophy of Khudi - the development of the self.

The etymology is striking:

  • Khud = self
  • Khudi = selfhood, the developed self
  • Khuda = God

To know the self deeply is to approach the divine. That’s Iqbal’s whole project.

But there’s another word: Khud-kushi. Literally, “self-killing.” Suicide.

In an Iqbalian frame, khud-kushi isn’t just ending a life - it’s the collapse of a khudi. The self, exhausted. The spirit, crushed.

And here’s what haunts me: the ecosystems that should build khudi often end up exhausting it. Universities. Hospitals. Institutions that claim to nurture brilliance but grind it down instead.

Lives cut short

I’ve been cataloguing the lives I’ve learned from. They fall into rough categories.

Crushed by systems

Aaron Swartz - co-created RSS, co-founded Reddit, fought for open access to knowledge. Downloaded academic papers from JSTOR using MIT’s network. JSTOR didn’t press charges. The U.S. government prosecuted him anyway, threatening 35 years in prison. He took his own life at 26.

Lesson: don’t fight power without a mask on. Don’t upload torrents with your own IP. The Anonymous hacktivists had it right - “We are legion. We do not forgive. We do not forget.” Fun times, those.3

Alan Turing - cracked Enigma, invented the theoretical foundations of computing, was prosecuted for being gay. Forced to undergo chemical castration. Died by suicide at 41.

Lesson: brilliance doesn’t buy you immunity from persecution. The institutions you serve may not protect you back.

Consumed by self

Chris McCandless - walked into the Alaskan wilderness seeking truth. Died alone, possibly from starvation or poisoning. He was 24.

Lesson: you don’t have to visit a literal jungle to find solitude. Disconnection isn’t peace. It’s just disconnection.

Srinivasa Ramanujan - mathematical genius, plucked from Madras to Cambridge, produced work that mathematicians are still unpacking a century later. Died at 32, health destroyed, far from home.

Lesson: the system cared about the theorems, not the person. Stay close to people who care about you, not just what you produce.4

Ted Kaczynski - mathematics prodigy, youngest professor at Berkeley, retreated to a cabin in Montana and became the Unabomber. Killed three people, injured dozens. Died in prison in 2023.

Lesson: don’t let isolation and ideology consume you. He had a mind that could have done anything. Instead, it turned inward and curdled.

Burned bright

Évariste Galois - revolutionary mathematician, died in a duel at 20. The night before, he frantically wrote down his mathematical ideas, scribbling “I have no time” in the margins. Gone in a morning.

Lesson: teenage angst can hurt you more than you know.

Swami Vivekananda - brought Vedanta to the West, electrified the 1893 Chicago Parliament of Religions, founded the Ramakrishna Mission. Died at 39 from diabetes and exhaustion. He packed several lifetimes into one.

Lesson: don’t leave your loved ones. Stay grounded in society. You don’t have to attain nirvana alone. I appreciate the Islamic view here: do not become an ascetic. Don’t forskae the world.

Moral collapse

Bernie Madoff - ran the largest Ponzi scheme in history. Destroyed lives. Died in prison.

Lesson: don’t sell your soul. The math always catches up.

Suicide

This is perhaps the most devastating category.

I remember an early morning class at IIT Delhi. Machine Learning. Large lecture hall, LHC 311. The professor walked in and said a student had committed suicide the night before.

He asked if we all had someone to talk to.

And that was it. Five, maybe ten minutes. Then back to principal component analysis.

I sat at the last bench. I don’t remember much else. Except the rage that fills me whenever I revisit that moment.

If I were in his shoes, I don’t know what I’d have done differently. But something more? Surely something more.

The student’s name doesn’t matter here. He stands for everyone who’s been crushed by an institution that moved on too quickly. Every IIT suicide is a loss to humanity - not because of what they might have built, but because they were people, and they deserved ecosystems that built their khudi instead of exhausting it.

Lives fully lived

Not all my borrowed years come from tragedy. Some come from people who lived long and well.

Einstein - worked as a patent clerk while rewriting physics. Imagination mattered more than credentials. Also: even genius carries regret. The atomic bomb haunted him.

Euler - went blind and increased his output. Dictated papers until the end. Keep working. The work is the point.

Steve Jobs - obsessed with craft. “The back of the fence should be as beautiful as the front.” But also: he denied his daughter Lisa for years. Brilliance doesn’t make you kind.

You die twice

Aditya once told me: “You die twice. Once when you die. Once when your last memory dies.”

I think about this a lot.

The famous figures - Swartz, Turing, Ramanujan - their memories won’t die for a long time. Wikipedia ensures that. But the people I’ve lost personally? Their memories live in smaller circles. Families. Friends. Me.

The weight I carry

The famous lives are easy to analyze. Wikipedia pages. Biographies. Clear lessons.

But the heaviest weight comes from people I actually knew.

My father, Zafaryab Khan. Bipolar. Alcoholic. Abusive to my mother. But he loved me and my brother, and sometimes I just miss that love. I yearn for it. I’ve written about him before - the separation, the regret, the inheritance of mood disorders. His life is a lesson to everyone who knew him.5

Kadeem Islam - Bhaiya mamu. My maternal uncle. Died in 2009 of renal failure. My mother donated her kidney to him. He lived five more years. Then he didn’t.

Islam Khan - my dada.

Anisa Begum - my dadi.

Rao Sajjad Ali - my nana.

Meena taiji - a neighboring aunty who helped raise me.

Zishan - a friend I lost during COVID. He was a staunch theist at a time when I was vehemently atheist. But he was always gentle with me. Always explained things the right way. Always helped with whatever questions I had.

Umar Khalid - a one-year-old cousin. Named by my elder cousin Mohd Khalid - Bhutto Bhai. He succumbed to some disease before he could become anything. What lesson can you learn from a baby’s death? Maybe none. Maybe the lesson is just: some deaths don’t teach. They just take.

Umair Ali Chauhan - an 18-year-old cousin, somewhere on the autism spectrum. He fell in a river and drowned. I cried rivers on the one-year “anniversary” of his death, just thinking about what he’d have gone through in those last moments. There’s a scene in The Old Guard where immortal characters are shown drowning - unable to die, unable to escape. That image stayed with me.

Dr. Sumbul Khan - a 30 year old cousin. MBBS, completing her MD, had just written her thesis. Died of a heart attack six months ago. What possible lesson could I derive from her life? She did everything right. And still.

Some deaths don’t have lessons. They just have grief.

What will I leave behind?

I started this post at a funeral, watching people position for property.

Rao Shahnawaz Khan never married. Had no children. Left behind some land, some possessions, some stories about a cat.

I’m 32. Maybe 300, by my own accounting.

I carry Swartz’s warning about fighting power unmasked. Turing’s reminder that brilliance doesn’t protect you. Ramanujan’s lesson about staying close to people who love you for you. My father’s love and his chaos. Bhaiya mamu’s angst. Zishan’s gentleness. Sumbul’s potential.

The weight is heavy. But it’s mine.

When I die - whenever that is - I hope I leave behind something worth fighting over. Not property. Not possessions. Maybe just: lessons. Stories. A few borrowed years for whoever’s counting.

Franklin said: “If you would not be forgotten as soon as you are dead, either write things worth reading or do things worth writing.”

I want to do both. Double dhamaal.

  1. The film is almost entirely dialogue - a farewell party that turns into an interrogation. It was written by Jerome Bixby, who finished the screenplay on his deathbed in 1998. Fitting, for a story about what one life can hold. ↩

  2. Satya Yuga and all that. I’m being hyperbolic, obviously. But the hyperbole has a point. ↩

  3. I wrote more about Swartz and Turing here. MIT’s “neutrality” was complicity. The system didn’t pause. ↩

  4. An ecosystem that should build khudi, exhausting it instead. Cambridge got the notebooks. India got the body. ↩

  5. Also in my Soz-e-Qalb post. The domestic violence, the scattered family. You can’t understand my soz without knowing there was something to burn. ↩