Unhappiness = Happiness??!!

“ What do you want to be when you grow up?”
“ I want to be happy”.
“No, No ..you don’t understand the assignment”
“No, No..you don’t understand life”
     -Lennon

Of late, the primary sources of my thoughts and knowledge  are whatsapp, twitter and Facebook :P. Its probably a testimony to how intelligent I was before, that people don’t seem to notice the current fall in standards of my thinking :P..hehe.

Anyways, this was one forward a friend forwarded and I was so absolutely amazed at the profoundness and stuck by the simplicity of the thoughts expressed that it made me think of a ridiculously complex theory about happiness :P

I have decided to call it the Unhappiness Threshold theory …According to my new theory, I have concluded that  it is extremely essential for a person to be sufficiently unhappy for him to even try  to reach a point of happiness… Huh?..U say..Lemme explain..

I suppose, we can agree that every single minuscule thing we do right from the time we are born is all aimed at realizing an objective which will make us happy. This happens even before we know we are doing something and definitely before we know what happiness is. Given the wholehearted 24 * 7 effort we put into being happy, seems to me, we should all have been more..eh ..happy.

Now, there are at least a zillion reasons why people are not as happy as they want to be.. Many of them are not resolvable…like loss of a loved one, loss of health etc etc ..Since, there is precious little that can be done about these, we will leave these out of consideration for this theory…

However, fortunately, most of us are not hounded by any of these earth shattering problems. At the most, we only have teeny tiny niggles, worries and concerns that  we constantly worry and fuss about. Infact, these are so tiny that we usually don’t do anything about them..
Consider some instances,

A person who is slightly overweight never does anything consciously to reduce weight.. He/She is more likely to passively worry about it than actively try and to do something to cast the problem away.

Or a person who is bored of his job. I see people like that all the time. And mind you, I am not taking about financial considerations here. The fix needed could be something as simple as getting a project change. They are a lil unhappy about their jobs but they shrug it off and get the work done and only crib about it from time to time.

But this passive worry does have a cost to it.. It stops the person from achieving that ideal blissful happy state. And this behavior, on the face of it ,is against our natural instinct. So, what is causing this deviation?

 This is where my theory comes in. I think the reason we don’t act on these worries is because the unhappiness they cause is too insignificant compared to the perception of the effort we think is required in order to move to a better state. So, till the unhappiness levels cross a threshold ( which could be different for different people and for  different situations), the action required to move to the happiness state is not performed.

So, next time , you think you are not happy enough, check and see if you are unhappy enough!

Confusion..Confusion!

I think we, as a community are a highly confused lot. On one hand, we will sit morchas and stage protests demanding eradication of corruption and equal treatment for all and all that.
On the other hand, we will sit up shocked and say the most ridiculous of things when the system unexpectedly wakes up and metes out equal treatment.

Maybe its just that we haven’t been brought up that way . We simply dunno how to handle it when things are equal.
I mean, don’t we all know from Animal Farm days that ‘All are equal. But some are more equal than others’…
Subconsciously, I think this is how we want things to be.Or atleast that’s the only reason I can think of to explain the huge hue and cry over Salman’s Khan conviction  and the subsequent jubiliation over the suspension of the sentence...

Or am I missing something major here??…Sigh!

P.S: The title is supposed to be read the way Salman Khan says Confusion..Confusion to SRK in KKHH :P

God's wry sense of humour :)

Sometimes it takes great melancholy to make you see the world for the unfair place that it is, to make you realize that He is probably sitting up  there and having a good big laugh as you toil and garner all your strength and determination to get through the very difficult and trying challenge life has just thrown at you.

Though I am normally not one to have such profound insights on life or anything else for that matter, I chanced upon this discovery when I had just finished devouring my rather tiny (:P) triple sundae and had to decide on whether to top it up with a second helping or settle to eat some measly looking heathly thing. The enormity of the decision (:P) coupled with the huge pain the impending sacrifice would cause made me think of these existential questions.

Really, why in God’s name did karela have to be healthy and ice cream n pizza n cheese n butter n all the nice sweet things in life be unhealthy. Would it have been so difficult for Him to have effected the opposite scenario? Imagine a world where u were sick and u went to the doctor and he told you off for exercising too much and for not eating enough potato chips and advised you to sit on the couch and watch TV whilst munching your heart out on the choicest of  goodies to get back to health..ah! bliss :-)

And such seemingly inexplicable situations are not limited to food alone. He let us all be perpetually foolish and to never truly appreciate what we have till it was gone .. Remember , how most of us went through childhood and college wishing we were adults who didn’t have to study and do homeworks…and how as adults, we keep ruing about childhood and the joys of it. Or how most single people dream of getting married and most married people talk of joys of being single or how you never truly appreciate getting up late on a Sunday morning and whiling away the whole day doing no productive thing till you have small kids of your own who seem to think Sundays are ‘Get up at 6 AM days’ :O.. Would providing a few fast forwards visions in life  been so tough for him:P

Speaking of kids, I think this is where He decided to have the most fun ..hehe.

Just the other day, I was reading up an article which said something about the only way to raise perfect kids was to be perfect ourselves…I would have instantly dismissed the article out of my mind certifying both my kid and ourselves as perfect..after all, self doubt hardly helped anybody, but my kid at that minute was ..ahem..not being perfect.

Years of development experience has taught me a few basic things:

a) you deny the bug – I couldn’t as it was screaming at the top of its lungs in my face  

b) you  hope its somebody elses code :P – Thought of pinning the whole thing on P ..Only, it wouldn’t work coz I spend half the time complaining bt how P isn’t at home enough and I end up taking credit for doing everything for sonny boy. .honestly, should practice a lil bit of lying low. :P

c) Fix it- huh? Whaddya mean?..I am not perfect ?

d) Ignore it- which is what I did :P..after all who doesn’t scream around a lil bit now and then and really screaming is a healthy outlet for all pent up emotions.Sure,he may need a lil education about not screaming in my ears..after all , lets face it, its amongst the depleting set of my sense organs which hasnt reported a problem till now :P

On most days I am ok with His arrangement with kids but on days like above, I dunno why He had to go so big on genes…Sure, we all love ourselves and our families but I dunno if I would have complained too much if I could have let our perfect family aside and instead chosen Hrithik’s looks, Sachin tendulkar’s dedication and so on for my kid:P