An Unfinished affair

Every person has some story to narrate. But why would you listen to it, and why would anyone else spend two minutes of their lives just to read about some wannabe blogger who is just another guy from the crowd. And having said so, let me steal those couple of minutes from your lives and I promise I’ll not disappoint your investment. I am a banker and you can trust me with your time if not money !

Once an wise man asked me, “ What do you understand by the word happiness and how do you intend to find it ? “ I had answered back then that I would get a degree and then a job and perhaps one day be able to buy all the commodities that make me content, and subsequently be happy. But years have passed and still the question continues to chase me both in my conscious and subconscious minds. Things have changed so much drastically over the last couple of decades , that even the word change seems scared these days. The nerdy IIT guy who had oiled hairs and round glasses and scored a 90% in his school board exams has now become the techie-turned-entrepreneur whose startup-up’s shares seem to have found the stairway to heaven . The banerjee and chatterjee aunties now talk about their On-site returned children and their intentions of founding startups.They are successful but it doesn’t end there. Their version of success needs validation and where better to find it than the social networks. The middle class of yesterday has found newer measures of scaling success. But how have they scaled ‘ being happy’ ? Science and technology have leapfrogged all other avenues of research and yet we are light years behind the formula for calculating joy. We have instruments for measuring the amount of insulin in our blood but the instrument to measure happiness is yet to be invented. Where did we loose the plot and when did we actually choose the path which has led us here. Probably, somewhere down the road there must have been a diversion which distracted us from the road towards happiness and the road towards presumed happiness. I remember, a boy working in a nearby food stall tell me about how his father used to take him and his sister out on the weekends to see the big markets and they could just afford some nonchalant restaurants on his father’s meager paycheck and still they used to be very happy at the end of the day. The paper-boats on the rain filled drains made him happy. Today he does own a restaurant of his own, takes his father out in his chauffeur driven sedan and yet he seldom sleeps with a glimpse of joy . That’s why I believe happiness is a state of the mind and we have grown so fond of running after this state of presumed happiness , that we might have actually forgotten what makes us smile.

We might need some shaking up from this delirious state so that we are back on track again in pursuit of some real joy. A lot of milestones are waiting to be reached , but fun lies in enjoying every milestone and not just running from one to another. Life is short, and the journey must be worth remembering as that is where the story lies. Loosening up a bit will be a good head start and and finding small things of pleasure will be a firm foothold on Noah’s Arc. And thus today, i am a bit near to finding the answer to that wise man and when I meet him next , I’ll tell him, “ I cannot define happiness and neither do I intend to find it, for I walk along with it in parallel lines with a hope that these lines intersect more often than not.”