Worry, don’t be happy
A still from the film Company, which was based on the underworld
This business of attaining happiness — or the ultimate state of nirvana — fascinates me. Everyone desires to reach a state of absolute bliss. No worries, no anxieties, no responsibilities, no guilt. In this condition, life means absolute pleasure without an iota of pain.
This sounds great but give this a rethink. Because the terms pleasure and pain cannot be absolutely defined. They are relative terms. Let me offer you an example. Suppose a man is accustomed to eating stale bread as his daily meal. If his diet is suddenly changed to something like biryani which tastes much better, he experiences pleasure.
His degree of pleasure is in direct proportion to the improvement in the taste of his everyday meal. If he is offered still better food, his pleasure increases further and if one day suddenly, he has to satisfy his hunger with stale bread, he experiences misery.
This is because, he has obtained the knowledge of something which had enhanced his pleasure.
On the other hand, if stale bread is the only available food on earth, the terms pleasure and misery will be meaningless. There will be no scope for comparisons. Even if the supply of a wonderful meal is continued over a long period, without any variation, the man will get tired of it. Conclusion: Pleasure can be derived only through comparison.
Consider another example. If a man feels he is good looking, it is only in comparison with other men who are not as good looking as he is. If he is sad about this aspect, it is because of men who are better looking than him.
According to my understanding, then a world of absolute happiness is a world where all people are identical in appearance and can boast of an equal amount of intelligence. Differences in the degree of intelligence would merely give rise to certain complexes. Also in a perfectly happy world, everyone should have equal power and an equal quotient of artistic ability.
To sum up, each and every individual’s tastes, behaviour, appearance, intelligence and capacity of doing work must be the same. Since everyone will have the same kind of thought, there will be no need to speak to each other or even be interested in or curious about the other. It would be an utopian world alright. But it would be a world devoid of competition, initiative, backbiting and short-changing. It would be a world of the living dead.
I’m glad I’m not dead. So whenever I’m asked if I’m a happy person, I either look away or say to myself for the umpteenth time, “What a stupid question!” The fact of life is that only the negative things are primarily responsible for creating positivity.
People are more interested in Hitler than in Gandhi and in Phoolan Devi more than in Mother Theresa.
Speaking for myself, I would have starved to death if Dawood Ibrahim was not born. That’s because I designed my entire career on my study of goons, gangsters and terrorists. If not for them I would have been leading the life of a boring civil engineer. I sincerely thank God for creating negativity and negative people, thus making my life so pleasurable. Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh!
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