The Immortality Paradox:

Why humans chase eternal life—and why living too long may be a curse.

Lease Extension

Finding himself seated in front of a panel of three stern, unsmiling, and intimidating characters, he was rather nervous, for he couldn’t readily recollect why he had been summoned here.

“Why do you need the extension?” The Chief, the one in the middle, barked in a hoarse, gravelly voice.

Which extension? The current lease for the government land on which he had built his house had years to expire. Why, then, had he been summoned, he panicked. But the Chief was waiting rather impatiently for a reply; so, he mumbled, ‘For the usual reasons.’

‘Hmm..,’ muttered the egg-head looking down at the records, ‘Granted. Further lease for a period of thirty years subject to the Granting Authority’s sovereign and absolute right to prematurely terminate the lease at any time without assigning any reason. Copy of the orders will be uploaded on our portal. You may leave now.’

He promptly rose to leave, but asked with due deference, ‘Your Honour! Which lease has been renewed by Your Excellency?’

‘Your Lifespan. Subject to the usual T&C. Effective from today.’

He woke up with a start, sweating a little despite the AC set at 22degree C. He checked the time – 3.30 AM. Dreams at dawn usually come true, so say the scriptures.

Thirty more years? He couldn’t decide if it was a boon or a curse.

Mahabharata: Yaksha Prashna

In the Mahabharata, Yudhisthira must correctly answer the one hundred and twenty-six questions which the Yaksha guarding the lake asks to revive his dead brothers and to drink the water. One of these cryptic questions was –

Yaksha: किमाश्चर्यं? What is most bizarre?
Yudhishthira:
अहन्यहनि भूतानि गच्छन्तीह यमालयम् ।
शेषाः स्थावरमिच्छन्ति किमाश्चर्यमतः परम् ॥

Day after day, countless beings go to the abode of death. Those that remain desire to be immortal. What can be more bizarre than that?

Death & Religion

Fear of Death is the greatest human fear. While survival instinct is common to all living organisms, ‘death-awareness’ is unique to humans.

All religions are rooted in man’s fear of death, and attempt to handle the angst of annihilation of the body with various myths and postulations. In the Bhagavad Gita, Sri Krishna consoles Arjuna with one such comforting concept – rebirth:

जातस्य हि ध्रुवो मृत्युर्ध्रुवं जन्म मृतस्य च ।
तस्मादपरिहार्येऽर्थे न त्वं शोचितुमर्हसि ॥ २-२७॥

Death is certain for the born, and certain is birth for the dead; therefore, you should not grieve over the inevitable.

Religions also offer Heaven as the best country for permanent abode. A most colourful and fragrant bouquet - ambient climate, high society, freedom from hunger and thirst, old age and disease, eternal life of joy, and other such luxuries and perks. Of course, the citizenship permits are more restrictive than US Green Card. Yet, isn’t it ironical that everyone defers the journey as long as possible, preferring life on earth with all its limitations and imperfections?

Chiranjivis: The Eternals

Can humans be immortal? Even the avatars of Vishnu – Sri Rama and Sri Krishna – were not. However, a pratah smarana mantra recites the names of the eight chiranjivis – Ashwatthama, Bali, Vyasa, Hanuman, Vibhishana, Kripa, Parashurama, and Markandeya – with the hope that the reciter or the listener will be rid of sickness and live up to a hundred years. Eternal life was no blessing for all the chiranjivis; it was a terrible curse for Ashwatthama who had used Brahmastra for infanticide.

India’s Longevity Menu

Long before Silicon Valley’s billion-dollar anti-ageing startups, Ayurveda and yoga offered holistic approaches to longevity. Yoga, meditation, pranayama, Ayurvedic diet, and disciplined living were known to extend vitality and mental clarity. While not promising immortality, they emphasized harmony with nature and balance in life.

Quest for Immortality

The Quest for Immortality is no longer the stuff of dreams; today it is vigorously pursued globally by more than 700 biotech companies and startups with USD 30 billion or more invested in anti-ageing, life-extension technologies, and solutions. One of these companies aims to ‘cheat death,’ nothing less!

Aubrey de Grey, the promoter of SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) and co-founder of SRF (SENS Research Foundation), claims that the human who would live for 1000 years has already been born!

Ambrosia offers blood plasma from donors aged 16 to 25 at US $8000 per litre, and a bargain price of $12000 for two litres!

Cryonics facility is offered by several US companies - Alcor Life Extension Foundation, Arizona; Nectome, San Francisco; Cryonics Institute, Detroit; etc. Whole body can be frozen, and revived anytime in the future, for a very affordable cost of US $200,000. Freezing only the brain costs much lower. A minor inconvenience is that the liquid which will be injected into the body or brain for freezing will kill the person!

In his book “The Singularity is Nearer: When We Merge with AI,’ Ray Kurzweil has predicted that AI will surpass human intelligence by 2045, humans and machines will merge, and brain-computer interface will phenomenally enhance human capabilities. The physical limitations of human brain will be transcended by using the vastly superior processing capacity and speed of a virtual brain. It may be feasible then to upload the brains preserved under cryonics to a computer, in which case your brain would be immortal!

Modern Longevity Science

Recent breakthroughs in cellular reprogramming using Yamanaka factors have shown promise in reversing age-related decline in mice. Scientists are cautiously optimistic that similar techniques could one day rejuvenate human tissues, offering a biological path to extended lifespans beyond what traditional medicine imagined.

Longevity Start-ups: India

India is warming up to the commercial potential of longevity science. Gaurav Gupta, Co-Founder of Zomato, has launched a longevity start-up - Gabit (a portmanteau of “good” and “habit”). He claims to have reduced his metabolic age by 14 years! Gabit offers a smart ring to track sleep, fitness, stress, and nutrition. Deepinder Goyal, Co-Founder of Zomato and Eternal has launched ‘Temple’ – a health-tech start-up; also offering a wearable device to continuously measure cerebral blood flow and neural activity.

Why We Die

In Why We Die: The New Science of Ageing and the Quest for Immortality, Venki Ramakrishnan, winner of Nobel Prize in Chemistry in 2009, takes a gentle dig at the entrepreneurs who have funded or supported anti-ageing, life extension technologies and research:

These “tech billionaires are mostly middle-aged men (sometimes married to younger women) who made their money very young, enjoy their lifestyles, and don’t want the party to end. When they were young, they wanted to be rich, and now that they are rich, they want to be young.”

Bryan Johnson

Bryan Johnson, American tech entrepreneur, is 47 but determined to achieve a biological age of 18 for which he has adopted an interesting lifestyle under Project Blueprint; he eats his dinner at 11.30 AM, sleeps at 8.30 PM and sleeps for 8 hours and 34 minutes on the average, swallows 30 or more pills a day, and has 43 biomarkers monitored by a team of 30 medical professionals. It costs him about two million US dollars a year.

“I have achieved the best biomarkers of anyone on the planet,” he said in an interview. Further, he claims to have recorded the best sleep score in human history. He also participated in the world’s first multi-generational plasma exchange with his then 17-year-old son and 70-year-old father; but discontinued further exchanges for lack of any tangible benefit!

More recently, Johnson has shifted focus from personal biohacking to broader longevity research and public advocacy. He continues to promote his “Don’t Die” philosophy, experimenting with new approaches to age reversal while sparking debate about the limits—and desirability—of radically extended lifespans.

Ethical Concerns

If immortality technologies succeed, who will access them? Critics warn of a future where only the wealthy can afford age-reversal treatments, deepening inequality. The Yaksha’s question—what is most bizarre?—may find a new answer: a world where death becomes optional for a privileged few.

Why I Dread to Live for 150 Years: By the Blogger

Upon thoughtful consideration,
I dread the proposition;
Reasons are many,
But here is a brief summary.

What-if sarkar stops my pension
Upon Sahasra Chandrodaya darshan
(Eighty-two years and 50 days, for your information)?
Our Shastras provide enough justification!

The house we live in, we built decades ago,
Soon it will be fit for demolition,
After buying new body parts,
Can we still afford the astronomical cost of construction?

Last, but not the least,
An old mind in a young body,
Would be a perverse oddity,
Friends and peers long dead and gone,
Life would be awfully forlorn.

What I say would be ancient history,
For the New-Gen, a puzzling mystery;
Folks will whisper with amusement,
There walks a historical monument;
Best to put him up for a Show,
For people to know,
The stupidity of living too long,
Like a fading, yet lingering, evening shadow.

Random Thoughts and Views on Death and Immortality

Pop Culture & Immortality

Immortality has become a recurring theme in popular culture. From Marvel’s Eternals to Netflix’s Altered Carbon, storytellers explore the allure and dangers of living forever. These narratives often warn that eternal life may strip existence of meaning, echoing the Yaksha’s paradox in a modern idiom.

Bhagavad-Gītā - 2.28

अव्यक्तादीनि भूतानि व्यक्तमध्यानि भारत ।
अव्यक्तनिधनान्येव तत्र का परिदेवना ॥

All created beings are unmanifest in their beginning, manifest in their interim state, and unmanifest again when annihilated. So what need is there for lamentation?

Mark Twain:

“I do not fear death. I had been dead for billions and billions of years before I was born, and had not suffered the slightest inconvenience from it.”

Bertrand Russel:

“I believe that when I die, I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive. I am not young and I love life. But I should scorn to shiver with terror at the thought of annihilation. Happiness is nonetheless true happiness because it must come to an end, nor do thought and love lose their value because they are not everlasting.”

Woody Allen:

“I don’t want to achieve immortality through my work; I want to achieve immortality through not dying. I don’t want to live on in the hearts of my countrymen; I want to live on in my apartment.”

Susan Ertz:

“Millions long for immortality who don't know what to do with themselves on a rainy Sunday afternoon.”

Mindful Living and Meaningful Life

Perhaps the real quest is not to defeat death but to embrace life with awareness. Mortality gives urgency to our choices, depth to our relationships, and poignancy to our joys. To live well may be the truest form of immortality—one that requires no cryonics chamber or plasma transfusion.

Prasanna Dash