Do you know when you'll die? At the eleventh hour!

Back in India, it seemed like everybody had a "sardaji joke" to tell.  While those sounded funny when young, the older I grew, the more I understood how awful it is to make fun of any particular group of people, especially when they are minorities.  It was one thing for Khushwant Singh to crack sardaji jokes--a few quite raunchy too--given that he was well within the comedic rights of joking about one's own group.  But, ...

One of those "jokes" was about the noon-hour, implying that a sardar was not his brightest self at that time.  That noon-hour syndrome could very well be the case for all of us who are getting older--a recent study indicates that if left to natural biological processes, and if medicines and machines do not interfere, then the probability that death might strike us at 11:00 am is quite significant compared to other times of the day!

[For] the population of people who have made it to old age -- the people who will die of natural causes rather than circumstantial ones -- there's a probabilistic element to the time that they will die. And that's because death by "natural" cause is natural in the fullest sense. Once we take leave of our technologies, our biologies take over. The genetic messages that empower our lives will also, eventually, orchestrate our deaths.

"A time to be born, a time to die" indeed!

Why, you ask?

Because, just as circadian rhythms regulate things like preferred sleep periods and the time of peak cognitive performance, they also regulate the times during which we're most likely to experience an acute medical event like a stroke or heart attack. As study co-author Clifford Saper -- who is also the James Jackson Putnam Professor of Neurology and Neuroscience at Harvard Medical School, and also the chairman of the Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center Department of Neurology -- explained to me over email: There is a "biological clock ticking in each of us."

Tick, tick, tiick, tiiick, tiiiiick, tiiii ....

So, for someone like me who was born in India but is now living on the other side of the planet, should I worry about 11:00 am in India or here? :)