Happiness entitled

On my recent visit to Mumbai, I stumbled into ‘Archies’ and ‘Tinkle’ comics and wow that felt nostalgic! I used to spend my entire conscious relaxation time reading these when I was a teenager! We had libraries where we would exchange them with other passionate readers, and we kept track of our copies very aggressively.

As I look back, I often wonder if we now live in a world or surplus? People spend hours just trying to figure out what movie or web series they should watch, and I feel that somehow the utility factor of many valuable things have gone down. For example, we had a time when a movie, just one movie would come up once or twice a week and boy did we wait for it! We ended up watching movies in languages we did not even understand. It may seem like a sorry state of affairs but then the opposite is not very pleasant either simply because the happiness related to scarcity does not exist as a concept for many. Think about a person who has been given the best of clothing, food or accessories available on Mother Earth. What is he or she going to aspire for? The benchmark has already skyrocketed and the only thing that will bring any pleasure here is probably cosmic. There are times when they resort to a simplistic living and find great joy in it. For all you know, maybe there is a relationship between the extremes of experiences. Something very similar happened with King Ashoka when he ravaged everything during the Kalinga war in 261 BC and he turned into a completely different person later in life!

On the other hand, I see some people finding great joy in simply buying a phone or taking a vacation that they always wanted to, and I think the emotion in itself is invaluable. I also think we all deserve to feel this, experience these waves of excitement and share this with people who care about us! It is also important that we encourage to let children feel a deficit before they get it all and feel entitled to all that they have been given, sometimes with great pain by a parent! This is especially important during a phase of their growth and development. After all, there are many crash courses to learn life skills but there is hardly a course that teaches how one to be happy.

Godspeed to those who are yet to learn ways to be happy and blessed are those who have figured this out already!