Parichay Patra

My name is Avinash Sharma. This is short part of my story of life. This part of my life is called blogging.......I landed on this planet some 22 years ago in a town/city called Ranchi ( the same place where the present captain of Indian Cricket team comes from). I was also not that bad at cricket during my childhood but it had to be him not me who was destined to lead the country and on the contrary I was to study engineering from BITS Pilani Goa Campus and attend PS2 program and hence start blogging, as our one of the seniors, Daniel bhaiya, say, " PS2 is the best time to start writing blogs". I am one of the guys among the crowd trying to win the rat race, trying to raise my head above the rest so that I can be identified, trying to do something with my life to make it worthy enough to live, basically trying to pursue Happyness.

In my first post I will try to justify the title of my blog which according to me is a very difficult task to do. People might have opinion(s) about the title. To some it might sound a heavy philosophical title and to others it might seem to be just another choice of differentiating one's blog from the rest. To be honest I could not think of a better title than 'In Pursuit of HappYness'. I am a big fan of Will Smith and as I have, most of us must have seen his flick titled 'Pursuit of HappYness'. Its my all time favourite. I have seen it a number of times and I love it. In the beginning of the movie he mentions about Thomas Jefferson's "Declaration of Independence". In that speech Mr. Jefferson used the word "pursuit" and "happiness" side by side. Eversince I saw that movie a big question has been bothering my mind. Was he correct? Can we ever achieve happiness? Will there be a day when we can really call ourselves happy? Is happiness a thing which we can only pursue and never have it? Trust me the question is still unanswered for me and to satisfy my innerself for the time being I have started believing Mr. Jefferson and hence I named my blog " In Pursuit of HappYness". The letter 'Y' instead of the correct letter 'I' is just for fun or to put in better words to make my self HAPPY as it is in the movie. In the rest of the post I will describe few incidents which I observed/saw in the recent past and somehow I was forced within to think and relate it to the emotion of happiness.

1) One day on my way back from work I saw a small kid selling tea in front of The Forum( a mall at Bangalore). He asked me if I want some tea. I refused and walked away. While walking I couldnt stop thinking about that kid and kept wondering about happiness for him. Selling tea at Rs. 3 per cup makes him happy ? Say, if he sells 20 cups a day and with those 60 bucks he gets food for his family which makes him happy and may be this is the reason he is doing that job or may be he has no other option and he is not at all happy doing this job. Then I thought from my point of view. Spending Rs. 3 was not a big deal. If i had bought tea from him I would not have thought about it in that much detail and it could have been over at that point of time. This straight away implies, ignoring that kid's offer and saving Rs 3 didn't make me happy.

2) On the same day as I approached home I saw an awesome car in shining black color( one of the many in Bangalore). The person inside that car looked so damn happy. Again a thought striked my mind. Fight for materials and objects. Earn them, the expensive ones, the exotic ones. The more you have them, the happier you are. Is it so????

3) I saw the latest movie of Will Smith, "Seven Pounds" and also I saw "Schindler's List". Both the movies are too good to be described in one post and they appealed to me big time. Here I was confused between selfishness and happiness. In the former, the actor of the movie considers himself to be responsible for the death of seven innocent people during an unfortunate accident and he decides that he will find seven good and needy people around him and help them in whatsoever manner he can. He does every thing he can. In the process he even commits suicide so that he can donate his body part to other people who need them. In the later one, which is from the time of Second World War, the actor is a German businessman and and he has thousands of Jews working under him in his factories. In order to save his employees from the German bloodshed he buys these employees in return of every thing he possessed. In the climax he feels sad and cries in front of his employees that he didnt do enough for his workers and and if he wanted he could have saved 10-20 more workers in return of his car,clothes, rings on his fingers. He wanted all of them to be saved from Germans even though he had to sacrifice each and every thing he possessed. In both the movies, the lead actors helped people around them. This made people around them happy. But if I look into the reasons behind this help, I find a sense of selfishness hidden in both the characters. In "Seven Pounds" the actor wanted to get over is guilt or in hindi the word is 'prayaschit'. In "Schindlers List" the actor had a business to run and for that he needed workforce and may be this was the reason he went to the extreme to help them out or may be he was too emotionally attached with his fellow workers to loose them. Whatever might be the reason, be it the business or emotional attachment or the quest to get over your guilt, the sense of selfishness seems to be one more probe towards happiness.

In all the above three situations described I tried to observe the ways in which we try to achieve happiness but surprisingly never achieve it. Happiness is subjective, it has different meaning to different people and further a single correlation of happiness with rest of the things never satisfies us. We want happiness to be multidimensional.

This blog of mine is a description of my quest in search of happiness in its true sense. I know it's a never ending safari and the deeper I go into the Jungle the darker it becomes. It can only be in my death bed where I would be able to explain the word 'Happiness' in a much much better way than today but for now I am already on with my gears and lets see how far can I run......

"Hazaron Khwahishein Aisi Ke Har Khwahish Pe Dum Nikle!
Bahut Nikle Mere Armaan Lekin Phir Bhi Kam Nikle!!"