‘Life’s the best thing that’s ever been invented’, said the Colombian Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez before succumbing to cancer at a refined age of 87 on the 17th of April this year. Through a decade long battle with the illness he wrote his memoirs, the wisdom of which I often use in dealing with neurosurgical patients. ‘The secret of good old age is none other than an honest pact with solitude’ he said in one of his most famous books – A thousand years of solitude. Contrary to today’s generation who believe it should be a pact with amplitude and altitude.
