In last one month, three person confided in me with their personal problems. Two of them work as office boys and one is a driver. I just happened to ask them about their well being and they just vented out the frustration life had thrown at them.
The first person, lives with his wife and a small child. His work fetches him a very small amount of money per month. With in his meagre income he has to take care of all the needs of his family. Every fortnight he has to take his child to a doctor in the city for check up due to neurological ailment. For taking to the doctor he has to take leave. As per his contract he won’t get paid if he takes a day off from work. Last month due to the child’s treatment he had to take many leaves resulting in lower salary not sufficient for the monthly expenses. He was showing his helpless ness where he has to choose between money and his child's health everyday.
The second person has two children, old parents and a wife to take care of. He himself has developed high BP and Diabetics. In addition to that he has a lump in the brain for which he was taking medicine since he cannot afford surgery. Along with the basic need and education of his children he has to take care of his parents medical treatment also. He hardly worries about his own health, considering that he can not do anything about it, except perhaps "worry".
The third person is a driver. He was thrown out from his ancestral family after he refused to join the clothing business of his father. He had a TATA Ace and a DJ system. To manage his life he had to sell his TATA Ace and now drivers taxi. While coming to the airport last he confessed in tearful eyes that he could not buy his daughter a gift on her birthday due to financial constraints. As if testing him to the limits, when I was returning from tour in his taxi, he informed that his daughter accidentally fell from bed and fractured her femur requiring a surgery.
Story of these three people are not rare but a common occurrence in India. I have seen people suffering in worse circumstances also. If an options is given, all three person would trade your or mine life happily with their’s. Our lives are far better than them and at least my problems are minuscule as compared to theirs. Still we find reasons to be unhappy about. When these persons worry about their survival we worry about the promotion we missed or the holiday that was cancelled. In short, most us has nothing to worry about, except imaginary problems.
A lot of things in our lives had fallen in right place which enabled us to be where we are. Any one misfortune and we could have been them. We overestimate our hard work and underestimate the fact that how lucky we all have been in our lives. Right from being born to a family who had the money and intention to educate us, to people who have supported and encouraged us throughout our lives, all the fortunate incidents have brought us to be where we are. In spite of having all the things we need, we whine about the things we do not have. Dissatisfaction can be channelised as motivation, but it should not turn into misery.
I was reading a newsletter by Mr Sandeep Mall where he encourages us to ask ourselves “What if this is the perfect life..?”. The question forced me into introspection. Often we question the decisions we had taken. in the past. Sometimes we regret doing or not doing things, imagining the other alternative to the path we took to be more rosy. This question forces us to imagine our life to be perfect inspite of all the short comings our lives have in unfulfilled desires, broken dreams, horrendous failures we still have enough of everything to live happily.
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