Sounds weird, but some people are already doing it. An Australian named Nicael Holt auctioned his life out of frustration. He started it as a joke, which turned into a fulltime job he never wanted. He has employed a friend to run the website because he himself is not computer literate and does not have internet at home.

Holt offered his life for sale, expressing interest to go through the deal with any buyer who paid him cash. The entry on eBay read "New life for sale." What was old and stale for Holt, others found new and refreshing. So it went like a hot cake. The bidding opened at $5 and ended at $5,875, continuing even after the deal was clinched. One bidder, likely to be a woman, has offered up to $30,000, while an unconfirmed bidder set the price at $150,000.

So, what goes into a deal like this? Well, Holt included his name, phone number and all of his belongings. It was part of the deal that he would also introduce the buyer to his 15 close friends, 170 other friends, two nemeses, and eight potential lovers he has been flirting with. The buyer will get his repertoire of six jokes, 300 CDs and a lamp given to him by an estranged girlfriend. Others include a fractured relationship with an ex-girlfriend, and a four-week training course to learn how to become Nicael Holt, including surfing, doing handstands, fire-twirling skills and his very special style of seduction.

More good news for the buyer, who will have access to a fruit delivery job Holt was going to start in March. The buyer will be entitled to $20 and a six-pack of beer owed him by two friends. A special attraction is celebration of Christmas with Holt's parents. That's all for buying a life, which is only 24 years old.

What will happen to Holt? He will take up a new identity, a new name, new friends, lovers and, perhaps, new parents. It is as simple as rebranding a shop. Just get rid of the existing stock before you switch trade, and change the signboard outside to announce change of business. Perhaps all that fuss about life is meaningless. It is an illusion that keeps the body hostage to the mind. Give up familiar faces, places and all their traces. A new life can breathe inside the same old body.

Food for thought, if you wish to think. What is life if not a concept conceived in mother's womb and then trapped in your own body? And that concept is expressed through motions which involve people, places and objects, as life configured in living is defined by company of persons, their positions, choices and habits. Under the witness protection programme in the USA, people who testify against mafia bosses are relocated with new identity. New name, new driving license, passport, often facelift, can give new life to someone who is constrained to escape his familiar scene.

But life leaves behind its indelible mark on the body, and the house is haunted by its evicted tenant. Memory retains the discarded life, its images stored in the brain like an archive of films. An American named John Freyer catalogued and sold nearly everything that he owned. He sold more than 600 items, including his false teeth, a full size office copier, personal photographs, and his winter coat.

Yet, Freyer couldn't give up the urge to reattach himself to the life he sold. In August 2001, he embarked on a journey to visit the various places to retrace his former possessions, and started to chronicle his travels on his ongoing travelogue site Temporama.com. He devised a new life out of the necessity to piece together old one which was sold.

In fact life is psychosomatic, when mind is folded into the body like a picture fitted in the frame. Only if it was possible to erase memory, we couldn't tell one life from another, whether lodged in the same or different body. Together mind and body create the life, while each moment lived is consigned to remembering, like the trail of ash grows on a burning fuse.

The oldest trade in the world was to sell the body. But there is a stigma attached to it because the identity of an individual is more directly associated with physical appearance than it is with mental scheme. Rape victims are tormented because once the body is violated, the mind keeps enacting it. Prostitutes find a way to tackle that problem. They allow the body to overpower the mind by getting repeatedly violated.

The newest trade in the world has arrived, and it allows you to sell your life keeping your body. You will live so long as you breathe, as if the air inhaled propels some mysterious machine that runs the illusion of life inside the theater of the body. Death is when the show is cancelled because the theater is closed. Now you have a choice to sell either the theater or the show.

A record company executive claimed that when he visited Maria Callas on her deathbed he wanted to snip off a lock of her hair, but fought back the temptation believing that the famous singer should go to her grave intact. Twenty-three years after she died, an auction was held in Paris where amongst her furniture, bras, stockings, latex girdle and pictures, was a swatch of slightly graying chestnut tresses marked Lot 202, priced at $2860.

Why wait for the auction until you are dead? Let it happen sooner than later, and spend the money while you can.

Mohammad Badrul Ahsan is a banker.