Why aren't we happy ?

For several months now, I am pursued by a question. It’s a question all of us have, may be not all of us, but most of us. Alright. Some of us. Fine! Just me. Okay.

. . . So the question is. ‘Why aren’t we happy? What do we want? Why is the other guy always lucky? And why isn’t everything fair? Where is this righteous indignation coming from?’



Right then, you think this subject’s appealing? No? Not even a little? What are you thinking then? ‘What has gone into this guy’s head?’ There! That’s what you are thinking. Well, actually, for a moment, I thought of it too. Okay. Enough now. I must begin, before I am too tired and before you lose interest . . .

Happiness, a term none of us know the real meaning of and yet we search for it all our lives. So what exactly is it? It’s the thing that makes you eat noodles and coffee with friends while you are driving at eighty kilometers per hour at two at night. It’s the thing that makes you take a pleasant hot bath, makes you spend millions at your wardrobe, makes you buy a Ferrari, makes you slog at your job, makes you propose the girl who’s way beyond your league, and makes you spend two goddamn hours writing an article that nobody’s interested in reading.



We want to be happy through external sources, like shopping, dining out, buying a car, etcetera. It’s amazing how people very proudly say, ‘I was feeling low so I needed couple of drinks.’ Yeah. You must. Of course. Why not. That’s your tranquillizer. Isn’t it?

As you must’ve heard, happiness comes from within, not from buying a car; clearly we are incapable of feeling good about ourselves so we need a car to do it, for the focus is on what I have, not on what I am. We are pretty much stuck at ‘what we have’ crap, and so much so that our whole sense of being collapses at the endeavors of buying that car, which is supposed to make us feel happy. Money, in a sense, has become this symbolic measure of our importance in the society. But as Shiv khera puts it, yes, money is important. It buys medicines and food. But it cannot buy health and appetite. It can buy house not home, a bed not sleep, books but not wisdom, a clock but not more time, companions but not friends, finery but not beauty, a ring not marriage, amusements not happiness . . . Stop! If this article’s making you ponder the meaning of life, or making you belittle the value of your priced possession, or making you gnash with fuming vehemence at the shoddiness of my language. Stop here.



Wow! You are still reading it. Aren’t you? But if you are anything like me, you are not

reading it at all, you are just skimping through the lines. And by now, you are probably done with you routine curses and swearing in at least three languages at the enchantment of this post. I, however, not considering of your burgeoning boredom, will drift into some more....Abe Lincon once remarked that ‘most folks are about as happy as they make up their minds to be.’ I have seen happy, smiling faces among the poor underprivileged children soiled in mud and seen grimaces on the faces of highly educated people sitting in the air-conditioned corner cabins in their office. There is nothing that’s happy or sad but our thinking makes it so. Your possessions will surely bring you happiness while it’s new but when the newness of that new product wears off dullness arises, and then you go on another quest for happiness. Therefore, let’s follow Abe Lincon’s advice for some time, right now you are reading this and you are probably buying it too, although, I don’t know any more about happiness than I know about the sexual orientation of a humming bee. But you are reading it, because you’ve told yourself to read it, and your mind follows your orders, initially it may resist a bit but eventually it will give in like a dumped guy at a cheap bar.



‘Alright, that’s enough!’ You are screaming this, right? Okay, may be, not screaming, that’s going a little overboard. And being a sophisticated breed you are probably just thinking of this. But you still want to read it, because at the bottom of it you know its philosophical or perhaps even true, or because I have tagged you, or because you have time, whatever. And oddly enough, I am not finished yet.

Become wise not rich. We are not seeking wisdom, we just want ‘comfort me comfort me.’ . . . The idea is to be content with what you’ve got. I mean a glass wouldn’t crave for more water if it is full to the brim. Disappointment comes from expectation, when we do not get what we expected, we feel bad because we are not ready for a different outcome than what we expected, and that’s when frustration and depression take birth. We are always looking for satisfaction, which is an extremely misunderstood concept. So, for the time, therefore, allow me to launce into my explanation of the word ‘Satisfaction.’ Where does satisfaction come from? From fulfillment of wants and desires. And what is satisfaction? The end of wants and desires. So the best way to be satisfied is not to have desires. Right? And if you don’t have desires, you don’t have anything to look forward to. No hopes. No dreams. Nothing to work for. Then what’s the purpose of living.



Enough philosophizing: and if for some bizarre reason you’ve made it this far, pat your back first, and then, let me make my point. I am not telling you to abandon the pleasures of life. Why must I drive you to accept that you’ll never be satisfied? I am, however, trying to say that our sources of happiness were are and going to depend on material things. And there is nothing unlawful in it, but, we must not forget that the real happiness will come from within and we can’t change it. So here comes the moral; if we have money, we should enjoy it. And if we don’t, we can still enjoy. We can still be alive. We can still be happy.



Thank you for you time and patience; and my hat, wherever that may be, is off to you.

Exams ! ! !

Sensing my unusual delirium, I begin my hypothesis of exams (exams! there's a cruel word, if you like) . . . while throng of boys and girls, with tilak, sandal wood paste daubed on their forehead, in between eyebrows, with books in their hands, riffling out pages, gathered in the middle of peak summer, reeking of sweat and nervousness to appear for, what it looked like from their faces, perhaps the most important exam of their lives, I, stood desultorily in bewilderment, with my friend who is as screwed up as I am, except he is capable of undressing women with only his eyes and whose business was to tell me which of the girls had the biggest of boobs or a perfect ass. And after the exam when we came out we were faced with paparazzi, only they didn't have cameras and they were parents, answering their own questions . . . "how was the paper? Was it easy? How did you guys do? Well no? Everybody did well? "Blah! Blah! I don’t give a shit about papers, I am lucky to be alive. Go get a life, codgers!

So what's it like? . . . Piece of shit! No, wait. It’s worse than that; it's like a pile of shit, with you in it. Enrolling for CA was the second biggest mistake of my life; the first one was when I fell for an Australian girl at the age of 13. Then, I fell into the trap of a pretty face and blonde hair; and this time too I fell into the trap, but of a longer title before my name: Chartered Accountant. Longer the title shittier (and that's a word) the course. They make it sound really professional and everything, but it's basically just high quality trash. I mean, it's the kind of stuff that makes you wanna fart in an aluminum foil and smell it . . . It’s going to take five years of your youth and you will, if you are lucky, end up with a job(if you pass, that is, which is going to take like a thousand years for me)

Once the exams are over, you are either recovering from an annihilating shock or preparing for another shock. Between the exams and the results you don’t know what to do, not that you did before, but this time it's different, I call it the pre-depression phase, the lull before the storm kinda stuff. Being a ca student comes with lots of gifts such as ability to, use a calculator, interpret financial statements (that nobody else is interested in doing), along with a few piffling medical problems such as hypertension, insomnia, schizophrenia. It has in itself become some kind of a disease, I say; I have a headache and people go . . . Oh! Exams coming no? It happens. I have high blood pressure . . . exam pressure right? It happens. One day I'll die of aneurism, blowing my temples, spouting blood from my mouth, and people will say he was a CA final student, after all, it happens . . .

. . . Everything in this world has a story, and every story has a moral, this one here, has one too. Last Sunday I went to Eden Gardens to see a game between KKR and Mumbai Indians, KKR played wonderful cricket only to loose on the last ball where they got hit for a six. So the moral goes like this: No matter how well you do, you can still get screwed at the very last moment, and no matter how bad you do, you can still end up winning. Exams are a bit like that, I suppose. You have to predict the unpredictable, conceive the inconceivable, and outdo the outdoers.