Counting blessings
Readers of this blog may have noticed, my general mood is that of being pissed off with life :). However, it is good to sometimes take stock and count blessings. After all, life cant be all that bad, there must be something going for me.
So where do we begin. I have a regular job, which pays good money. Never hurts to have some money in the bank. I am treated reasonably well within the workplace and have made a set of friends there. Due to the intensive nature of the company's training program, we have a lot of shared experiences to talk about. Many people are from Delhi and we often talk about our beloved city. I can afford to take a week off every 3-4 months or so and go home by plane. Considering that 2 years ago, I had never sat in one, this is quite an achievement.
On the home front, I live in a nice house in one of the better areas of Bangalore. There are lots of avenues for shopping and eating out nearby. My office is not too far away and if autos misbehave, its quite easy to walk back home. The place is quite, with lots of greenery. This peace is ritually disturbed by the yelling and screeching from the people living below us every morning. But I am usually asleep, or in office so am not frequently disturbed.
The inmates of the aforementioned house are all batch mates who spent 5 years together. The set of shared experiences and common acquaintances has made our existence an extension of hostel life. In addition to my flat mates, there are more batch mates who are neighbours. Some old hostel friends are frequent visitors. The presence of all of them has helped to reduce the shock of shifting to a new unknown place. Given all the rush in Bangalore over the weekends, time can just be spent by talking about the good old days in IIT.
Sometimes I wonder how other people who move into new surroundings get by without the presence of old friends ? Many people who I studied with might now be working or studying in places where they do not have old friends to lean on for support. It takes time to build up relationships and you have to start all over again with new people. With the help of the Internet however, old friends are never out of reach.
These are by no means an exhaustive list of things going for me. There are other things like good health, family, good education, the stamp of India's premier college. And many more things which I probably take for granted. I mean, how many of us a grateful about the fact that we got to go to school ? Last weekend, I watched a movie, Blood Diamond which is set in a remote part of Africa, where children's limbs are amputated by warlords and children are made to use guns to kill people. This kind of made me look at my life and that of my peers in a new light. We are not even aware of the kind of handicaps that many people around the world face.
Why look at the world, even in India people face various challenges due to their caste, religion, region, gender etc. The problem is that people try to level the playing field by striving for equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity. But I am digressing here. The point is that there is always a silver lining to a dark cloud.
The ideal state of affairs, as it is said in the Bhagvad Gita is that a person should stop distinguishing between lab-haani, sukh-dukh, jay-parajay. There should not be any difference between the dark cloud and its silver lining. I think that I have a long way to in this regard.
So where do we begin. I have a regular job, which pays good money. Never hurts to have some money in the bank. I am treated reasonably well within the workplace and have made a set of friends there. Due to the intensive nature of the company's training program, we have a lot of shared experiences to talk about. Many people are from Delhi and we often talk about our beloved city. I can afford to take a week off every 3-4 months or so and go home by plane. Considering that 2 years ago, I had never sat in one, this is quite an achievement.
On the home front, I live in a nice house in one of the better areas of Bangalore. There are lots of avenues for shopping and eating out nearby. My office is not too far away and if autos misbehave, its quite easy to walk back home. The place is quite, with lots of greenery. This peace is ritually disturbed by the yelling and screeching from the people living below us every morning. But I am usually asleep, or in office so am not frequently disturbed.
The inmates of the aforementioned house are all batch mates who spent 5 years together. The set of shared experiences and common acquaintances has made our existence an extension of hostel life. In addition to my flat mates, there are more batch mates who are neighbours. Some old hostel friends are frequent visitors. The presence of all of them has helped to reduce the shock of shifting to a new unknown place. Given all the rush in Bangalore over the weekends, time can just be spent by talking about the good old days in IIT.
Sometimes I wonder how other people who move into new surroundings get by without the presence of old friends ? Many people who I studied with might now be working or studying in places where they do not have old friends to lean on for support. It takes time to build up relationships and you have to start all over again with new people. With the help of the Internet however, old friends are never out of reach.
These are by no means an exhaustive list of things going for me. There are other things like good health, family, good education, the stamp of India's premier college. And many more things which I probably take for granted. I mean, how many of us a grateful about the fact that we got to go to school ? Last weekend, I watched a movie, Blood Diamond which is set in a remote part of Africa, where children's limbs are amputated by warlords and children are made to use guns to kill people. This kind of made me look at my life and that of my peers in a new light. We are not even aware of the kind of handicaps that many people around the world face.
Why look at the world, even in India people face various challenges due to their caste, religion, region, gender etc. The problem is that people try to level the playing field by striving for equality of outcome, rather than equality of opportunity. But I am digressing here. The point is that there is always a silver lining to a dark cloud.
The ideal state of affairs, as it is said in the Bhagvad Gita is that a person should stop distinguishing between lab-haani, sukh-dukh, jay-parajay. There should not be any difference between the dark cloud and its silver lining. I think that I have a long way to in this regard.
posted by anonymous coward at 11:39 am
1 Comments:
Hi,
As someone said, it's better to be pissed off than to be pissed on. :-)
PJs apart, I'd suggest you channel the anger and the pissed-offness into something that can undermine its causes.
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