There is no set agenda as I write this today, by agenda I mean that as I am writing this, I don’t have a set direction or conclusion for this piece. This is not merely a scribbling of thoughts, these thoughts are a result of agitations within me that have been piling up for days in my mind, heart and body, and writing them might channelise the negativity that causes these.
For me, all three – mind, heart and body- are closely related. A happy and contented mind fills the body with energy ,a lightheartedness that motivates one towards creativity, love, romance and general peace whereas a single thought of depression, a bad meeting with a person, a poor response from dealing with an institution (bank, internet service provider, travel agent) or just bad traffic can drain the energy out of someone.
I am a businessman, a small one and hence have a fewer liabilities, but even the day to day workings in the current environment, phone calls with negative, shrewd individuals make you feel drained of happiness and result in a loss of zeal to do something big and positive.
I live in North India where, in my opinion, life is all about money, status, cars, houses, branded clothes and wristwatches. As a kid and a teenager, money was always in dearth with my parents employed in government jobs, three kids and their motive to provide quality education. But I never liked money so much, was never attracted to big cars, houses or fancy clothes. Unfortunately, the way this society functions, it gives you no option but to run for it, get on the money-making treadmill and never hope to get derailed.
Life in India is not complex per se; it is difficult, not complex, because as aspiring educated males from the middle class, the society expects that you study, get a job, marry, raise kids, get them the best education, take care of parents and family, build assets and pass them over to the next generation. In between all this, you have fleeting moments of happiness when getting a job and a salary raise, marriage, seeing your children grow up, their achievements, few holidays with family and friends and festivals of course. I guess 90% of Indian middle-class people (lower and upper) live this life. Few moments of fun (happiness?) snatched from the daily grind of a long life (why do they say life is short, I have never understood).
This is what the economic growth of the ’90s and the last two decades has given us all, a treadmill to run on, without the choice to get off.
But then, this may not be my biggest problem yet, because I chose differently, deciding not to get married until I really wanted to and with someone, I really cared about. Having to brave the social pressure and families expectations as an elder son, especially when why father passed away, was difficult. This may be not a big thing in the metros, but in a small town where extended families do matter, you are answerable about all this in family gatherings and the like, and you have to manipulate things politely without trying to sound rude or become an outlaw.
We live in an age where so many people we studied with, in school and colleges, have chosen to settle in abroad (I may be wrong for other people but I was born in Punjab, it’s true for most of us), posting about their merry lives on Facebook, right in your face (is that the reason it’s called Facebook, by the way?).
I never wanted to settle abroad, I love my country and its complications. I love the challenges and opportunities that a growing economy provides, its politics and the fantasies of a realizing the “Nayak” (Anil Kapoor /Amrish Puri) in real life. I love being a part of the India of our dreams, of glory, of stories of our heroes we grew up listening to, undoing the mistakes of past and building on the dreams of people who left hoping.
But then things started changing when friends around started leaving for foreign shores after college, some on account of their software and IT jobs, or for higher education and rest simply immigrating. Facebook shows us the clean and green environments they live in, the houses and cars they own and general peace of mind they reflect even a few years after moving away.
A few foreign tours show the lives people are living abroad first hand, it shows that even if we work the same, earn the same, lives there are much simpler, more respectable, and less tensed. Even life beyond office hours seems fun and provides opportunities to relax mentally and physically. Even small things such as a smiling stranger, a shopkeeper who talks respectfully and doesn’t hurry you, a surety that the food one eats outside would be clean and unadulterated, minute things like the number of women working in the market somehow soothes you, calms you and, somewhere back in the mind, makes one feel the happiness in the air. The general quality of life is so much better.
While here, in India, our own lives here are professionally and socially filled with hate and deceit, superiors and landlords treating people as slaves, financial and physical(health-wise, also) insecurities, where people get cancer by just breathing the Industrial air or drinking water loaded with pesticides.
Here, we are stuck in traffic in crammed company transport for hours together, reaching home late (experienced first hand in Delhi, Noida, Gurgaon), where injustice can be rarely undone using the police or courts, whereas, as a consumer you are at the mercy of the service provider; where one cannot demand justice in a traffic incident or a simple dispute without the ever-lurking possibility of a physical confrontation; where many precious lives are lost due to bad traffic sense.
This is a place where women are always worried for their safety, where sexually frustrated men look like zombies searching for some respite -visual or physical -and where you can’t calculate how many days of your life you lost just by breathing the air today, where you save for years together to get few days of quality treatment at a hospital or marriage of a child or sister, where relaxation is limited to shopping malls, weekend movies and drinks. We try to manipulate our mind’s sense of happiness and contentment based on false ideas of materialistic accomplishments presented as happiness.