Living a hundred years? Oh, for dear life!

Raju Korti
Someone in his wisdom is reputed to have said that “you will live to a hundred if you give up everything that makes you want to." I have always smiled at that line half amused, half suspicious. What really brews a long life? Is it inherited luck, monk-like discipline, bland food and morning walks, or simply an unshakeable optimism that refuses to age? If life has taught me anything, it is this: longevity laughs at formulas.

I have known people who lived like instruction manuals. No smoke, no drink, eight hours of sleep, yoga at dawn, smiles on schedule and yet exited far too early. And I have watched others, best friends with cigarettes and sofas, casually outlive doctors’ predictions. The truth is messier, more mysterious, and far more human than any health chart allows.

In India, we bless each other with shatayushi bhava (may you live a hundred years). But not everyone longs for that milestone. Some fear becoming dependent. Others dread the slow fading of purpose. A few feel their life’s list is complete and would rather bow out gracefully than linger.

(Pic representational)

My own appointment with mortality arrived eleven years ago, on a hospital bed after a near-fatal coronary bypass. I suspect the doctors offered me a limited future measured in two years, simply because they had to be benevolent as professionals. Surviving that moment taught me something unexpected. When you are given life back, you no longer own it entirely. A part of it belongs to the world.

Not long ago, on a trip to Dharwad in Karnataka, I met a man introduced as 103. No fanfare. Just a dhoti, a kurta, bright eyes and a laugh that could shame youth. When I asked how it felt to live beyond a century, he pointed skyward and said softly, “All His writ(ing). No credit to me.” I touched his feet, not in reverence of faith, but in respect for wisdom uncluttered by ego.

He reminded me of Mike Fremont, the American who I read; beat cancer at 69 and sprinted joyfully past 100, thriving on plants, movement, sleep and sunlight. Ditto of the Japanese chef who refused retirement because purpose kept him young and  the Indian doctor who crossed 101 with discipline as his quiet companion.

Science now whispers of humans living to 150. Two lifetimes stitched into one body. Yet immortality, that oldest human greed, feels strangely unattractive to me. Because years without meaning are merely calendar pages turning.

And as I navigate my own chain of existential storms, I find my life captured best in these hauntingly beautiful lines:
Zinda hoon is tarah ke gham-e-zindagi nahi,
Jalta hua diya hoon magar roshni nahi.