You have to die to enter paradise.

A Dutchman, who has lived in Delhi for the last one year was wonderstruck on returning to the Netherlands for Christmas. He found paradise. " In the Netherlands, it struck me how utterly complete the project of nation-building is. In my view, the country is more or less finished. The roads are perfect, it is safe and clean, healthcare is superb, the cities are pleasant, gross domestic product-per-capita is among the highest in the world, we rank high in global happiness surveys, the legal system is impartial, we have an open economy and a strong liberal democracy, and the list goes on," he writes. This surely is paradise right here on earth. But, strange as it may seem, even here there are doubts. " And that is: what's next? What do you do as a nation when material aspects of your wellbeing are in place. My sense is that the Dutch are a bit clueless," he thinks. How true. Because there is nothing, indeed there can be nothing after paradise. It is alright for the dead because they have the whole universe to explore for eternity but for the living, restricted inside a destructible body and stuck to mother earth by gravity, it is difficult to be perpetually happy, with no challenges to overcome. And when you have paradise you will have barbarians at the gates clamoring to be let in to share in the bliss. To keep out the hungry hoards you must pull up your drawbridge and drop down the portcullis but that is impossible for a member of the Schengen area within the European Union which allows free movement of people without any restriction. Hence, Mr Geert Wilders of the Freedom Party has a pact with Ms Marine Le Pen of Front National of France to bring about a disintegration of the EU. They may have a point, as the murder of Theo Van Gogh in 2004 so clearly showed. Dutch passengers died needlessly in the shooting of flight MH17, in a war between other nations while Dutch UN peacekeepers were responsible for not preventing the murder of 300 Bosnians in 1995. But will a break up of the EU into nation states allow the Dutch to preserve their paradise in splendid isolation, secluded from the rest of the world behind high fences? And therein lies the problem. The wealth of the Netherlands comes from trade which will surely suffer if every country erected its own barriers, with import taxes and control their currencies through interest rates, as Switzerland did recently. So how to preserve paradise from outsiders? Perhaps it should be left to the Americans who are not hesitant about taking direct action. It takes a lot of killing to preserve a paradise. A sad fact of life.