Life

What is the point? You are born into a world that you know nothing about, if all goes well, by the time you figure things out you die. So again, what is the point? Is there a specific thing that we are to accomplish while we are alive? How do we know what it is we are supposed to accomplish? And if we don’t accomplish it, what happens then? Is one person’s assignment in life more important that another’s? These questions can’t be 100% answered, but they can be further explored through Jasmine.

Jasmine is a book by Bharati Mukherjee that I am currently reading in my Multicultural Literature class. The book is about a young Hindu woman named Jasmine who travels to America after a series of tragic events. Her main reason to go to America is to fulfill a dream of her suddenly dead husband. Upon arriving in America it is nothing as she imagined it to be. Her first couple of days was particularly rough. But fate changes for the better for Jasmine and she eventually becomes a nanny for family in New York; Wylie, Taylor and their daughter Duff. This wasn’t the end of the road for Jasmine; she went moved on to other adventures in life. But for now I will focus on a particular discussion between her and Taylor.

            Taylor, being an American man, didn’t understand all the ways of Jasmine. One particular Indian belief that weighs on Taylor is that a life of a person is merely to complete one of God’s missions, once completed they are “called up” (die) by God and are given a new mission to complete. Taylor’s response to Jasmine: “You don’t believe that, do you? You can’t, you’re more modern than that” (pg 59). I think this would a typical response among American citizens. I believe Americans have a “ME” complex. Where everything is about me? I make a difference in this world. My life is more important than just one single task from God. We like to believe this type of attitude because then that puts us in control. We like to believe that we have control over our lives.

            Jasmine has been taught all her life that she is merely on this Earth to complete on of God’s missions. Once she has finished that, she will move on to her next life with a whole new mission to complete. I believe that Jasmine uses this belief to cope with the numerous tragedies that have happened to and around her. That everything that happens is not random but rather delicately planned by God. She wanted to portray to Taylor that the “incentive in life is to treat every second of your existence as a possible assignment from God” (pg 61). This is no different than the saying that we have, “Live each day as if it were your last.”

            Jasmine tells Taylor that she doesn’t know what her mission or assignment is from God, perhaps it is to enlighten him (pg 59), or perhaps it is something else. We don’t know what is to become of our lives, but that doesn’t mean we give up on living. I believe that God works in mysterious ways and that even though it may not seem like much to us at the moment, God uses our lives for purpose. We don’t know what the purpose is and most of the time we don’t even realize that we are serving a purpose. We live to live, leave the rest up to God.