Reality Check

There is no point of getting a promotion on the day of your breakup. There is no fun in driving a car if your back hurts. Shopping is not enjoyable if your mind is full of tensions.
"Life is one of those races in nursery school where you have to run with a marble in a spoon kept in your mouth. If the marble falls, there is no point coming first. Same is with life where health and relationships are the marble. Your striving is only worth it if there is harmony in your life. Else, you may achieve the success, but this spark, this feeling of being excited and alive, will start to die.

Speech by Chetan Bhagat at Symbiosis

Recently my dear cousin, Poopsie, forwarded this article to me and I promptly forwarded this to some of my outlook contacts. But when I reread this it struck me that isn’t the thought amazing? We all seem to be running the race of our lives without realizing that our marbles have dropped off en route (no pun intended). Human beings are amazing in the sense that a single man can be a father, a son, a brother, a brother in law, a husband, a son in law, a teacher, a student, a friend, a mentor, a boss, an employee and so on all at the same time!! However with the gradual disappearance of the concept of joint families, with the lack of opportunities in one’s own area of expertise in one’s home town / state / country, peer pressure and the need to keep up with the Joneses, everyone is in this mad scramble for …….God knows what.

Take my own case. I worked in a Primary Health Center in a remote tribal district of the State on a salary of roughly Rs. 8000 per month from 2000 – 2003. Apart from catering to daily OPD load of around 150, we used to carry out deliveries, minor surgeries and so on. And the patients we catered to were real patients – sick people in need of medical help and not just rich people with imagined pains and aches mostly due to wrong lifestyle practices. I hardly got time to sleep and yet I was supremely happy. Money was never a problem and I seemed to always have a surplus. I could spend as much time I wanted with my parents and family. They too were very happy.

Then I got an opportunity to work with WHO on an assignment. Money was good and the brand name was the best in the industry. I jumped at the chance. It has been six years since. Money has got better over this period of time. But somehow, when I look back, the satisfaction levels have not even come close to my previous job at the village level primary health center. I had to stay away from my ageing parents. I missed my family, my patients and simple things like Mom’s cooking, long discussions with Dad on religion and politics, being able to talk in Oriya at office, adda / khatti with my friends.. small things.. banal things…Recently Dad passed away and I wished I had stayed some more with him when he needed me most (though he would have been the last one to admit it). Then I realized that life is a lot like my class 10th examination with 6 subjects. You score 90% in 4 subjects but 20% in the remaining two and you fail. However you score 40% in all six and you pass!!.

But the thing with this race is that in most cases it is a one way street. One requires lots of courage to give it all up and do what needs to be done (a la The Monk Who Gave Up His Ferrari). What we do instead is rationalize…. mostly to convince ourselves. Better education for children, better career, growth opportunities, better pay packages, better perks, better places to live in and so on.

Isn’t it funny: we love our children the most… in majority of cases even more than our parents. Then it has to be true that our parents have to be the ones who love us the most. I firmly believe that pure unselfish love cannot exist. However the love that comes closest to it has to be the love we feel for our own children…. which is the same as the love our parents must feel for us. Would we leave our sick child and go off to a better career opportunity? No way. Would we leave our ageing and sick parents to go off to a better career opportunity? You bet we would !!

Some unpleasant questions that we might consider answering:
1- Are there jobs where our expertise can be used closer home (if not in the same town at least in the same State)? If yes what are the major reasons for us not taking up the same so that we can stay closer to our parents?
2- Would it be wise to uproot our parents from the place where they have spent a lifetime and transplant them to a foreign place (where they would be like fish out of water) where we work just so that we can assuage our moribund conscience?
3- Try and remember the salaries our dads received and the pain and sacrifices they must have undertaken to give us the best of everything on that meager salary. Are we doing enough to repay that?
4- Is just sending money home to old and sick parents enough?
5- Do we call them up daily and discuss their fears and insecurities?
6- If our child treats us the same way that we treat our parents (when we are old, retired, sick and alone)… would we be happy?
7- Are we doing enough for our parents, our family, our friends, for our neighborhood, our town, our State, our country, our religion, our society or for anything other than ourselves?