It is not very often that I get time to ponder upon ‘Life’ and when I do I get stuck at some very basic elements. This might reflect poorly on me but the last time I tried to think about life, I got trapped by something as basic as ‘Emotion’. I realized that I do not even naively understand this simple word and yet I persisted (I have always been headstrong in that way). I was trying to understand what could qualify as the ‘strongest emotion of all’ – the gut said it has to be ‘Happiness’ (but isn’t happiness a state of mind guided by emotions rather than emotion itself?); the heart was rooting for ‘Love’; the mind had read somewhere that it was ‘Hate’ and I was sure that a suppressed part in the brain was advocating for ‘Rage’. Four strong contenders and yet I gravitated towards ‘Fear’. I think that just like colours, there are some basic emotions which combine to give a wide array of emotions and ‘Fear’ is the most basic of those basic emotions. I consider it to be the trigger ...