To die for

What is more frightening: To be in a room with terrorists or stuck on a tiny shipwrecked boat in the middle of the ocean along with – as in that great book, Life of Pi by Yann Martel – a Royal Bengal tiger, a hyena, a zebra and an orangutan?

Living close to nature – which is as menacing as it is beautiful (just like man) – I ponder this.

Animals, so I'm told, are essentially simple beings. They will attack if they are hungry or if they believe themselves to be in some danger. Stuck with a tiger, I can still hope that it's not hungry enough to eat me. Possibly I might even be able to convince it that I am its enemy, someone to be wary of. What I do know is that the tiger is not going to eat me for the greater glory of god or because it wants to go to heaven or anything quite so crazy, and this itself makes it a little less frightening to me.

Stuck with a tiger, I'll be very thankful that it doesn't care about the meaning of life. I suspect that the terrorist - like many an ordinary person - has thought too much about such things and has suffered from a sense of emptiness inside. But unlike the ordinary person he is not able to fill up this emptiness by a belief in god or family or love or work, or any of the other things that most people hold on to in order to go through life with their sanity intact. I suspect this to be true though I'm no psychologist. Neither can he lose himself in a kind of semi death through oblivion: through drugs or alcohol or orgies or other mind-numbing experiences. Instead he goes through the motions of living, seeking that elusive meaning and wanting only to die, but to die gloriously.

And then one day he finds the big answer to life. At last he has faith. At last he can believe in something. Life is not so puny a thing after all. It's so tremendous this feeling – like a surge of cocaine in his sick soul - that he's drugged with the power of it. Nothing can touch him anymore, not reason, not love, not anything.

I think I'd rather the Royal Bengal tiger ate me up. At least I wouldn't die despising it.