Where The Heck Happiness Is

Happiness is a much sought after commodity. Motivational speakers, faith healers, spiritual gurus and even WhatsApp mentors talk about its virtues and suggest ways to obtain it. Most of them agree it is a state of mind. But, what does exactly happens when you have this state of mind? Scientists believe that your brain produces certain chemicals like dopamine, oxytocin and endorphins when you are happy. Now, we don’t often rush to a laboratory to check whether we have these chemicals and then get to feel happiness. In actual, we experience certain feelings and sensations that give us the message of being in a state of happiness. Are these feelings like the common emotions of pleasure, love, peace, contentment, safety etc.? Or, are they more intangible than that? No one, it seems, has the final answer. The only thing that we all know is that happiness is scarce and a complex emotion that people get sometimes even from listening to the saddest songs.

That is why most wise men don’t try to define it but allude to the ways we can get it. There again, they differ widely and some of their ways go against each other. The old story of the enchanted shirt is not out of place even today. It goes like this. The king despite all the luxuries in his palace is not happy, actually thinks he is ill. All the doctors in his kingdom fail to diagnose his disease. Finally, one suggests that if the king sleeps one night in the shirt of a happy man, he will be alright. His couriers scour the entire kingdom but fail to find any. One day they see an idler rolling in the grass, singing and whistling. He seems to them a real happy man. When they ask him to spare his shirt for a night, the man gives a loud laugh and tells them that he has none.

The story affirms our belief that happiness lies neither in riches nor in power. Material possessions can give comfort but not peace of mind. More importantly, it indicates that happiness is an illusion – if you have the world, you don’t necessarily have it and if you don’t have the world, you may have it. Was it the dispossessed state of the idler that made him really happy? Nobody knows. The story ends with the king leaving his royal coterie and going out to live with the common people.

Does happiness lie in indulging yourself in the real world or turning your back on it? There is another story that gives an answer to this riddle. A young man was keen on finding the secret of happiness. He came to know of a sage who lived on the top of a hill. He goes there and discovers that the sage was no ordinary impoverished recluse. He had a huge castle where music, dance and a lavish party was going on for his followers. When the young man told the sage about his quest, the sage dismissed him saying he was busy with the festivities. But he asked the young man to take a round of the castle and come back in two hours, with a condition that he should carry with him a spoon filled with a few drops of oil. When the young man returned, the sage asked him about the beauties of his castle, but the young man had nothing to tell as he was engrossed all the time in managing the spoon and oil. The sage asked him to go back again and take a closer look at the castle carrying the same spoon. This time when the young man came back he was full of the description of embroidered curtains, intricate designs of carpet and the titles of the rare books that the place had. But when the sage asked him to show the spoon, to the astonishment of the young man it was empty. The oil was lost somewhere on his sojourn of the castle.

The balance, the sage told, is the secret of happiness. The world can be too much for some and too little for others, but moderation is the key. Happiness is a thing for the living; it is not an after-life feeling. So denying the pleasures of life is no way to happiness. Though people speak of heaven and hell, what use is pleasure or pain when the sensation of being alive is dead? It is much better, therefore, to make heaven on this earth.

And, this is how, a Puranic tale tells, we can do it.

Chitragupta, happy with a gentle soul from the earth, gave him a chance to choose between the hell and heaven. The man asked if he could visit both the places and decide. Chitragupta led him to the hell, where a grand feast was laid out on the table, but the guests were shouting, fighting and cursing each other because they had spoons too long to reach the dishes and back to their mouth. It was a complete melee and nobody could eat. Then Chitragupta took him to the heaven, where the scene was the same, but everybody was quietly enjoying the feast, because with those long spoons each one was feeding the other person across the table. Heaven on earth is when you live together and for each other. Giving is what gives you bliss and happiness. Anything that you give to others, money, service or time will return as joy to you.  

Whatever the source of happiness, its origin and form will remain ambivalent. We sometimes try to package happiness as a one-size-fits-all commodity. It is not so. The toys that give you happiness as a child soon change shape and size as you grow into a young person. The romance of your younger days turns into a drudgery as you mature. The pleasure of being strong and healthy turns into a nightmare as you grow old. Happiness keeps changing colours; it is fickle and transient. It is here today, gone tomorrow. You can’t hold on to it: the day must follow a night. So tune your mind to grab it whatever the time.

A man goes to a Sufi to seek happiness. The Sufi tells him to come the next evening. He goes the next day and finds the wise man looking for something outside his cottage. He asked the old man if he could help. The learned man told him that he had lost his ring and was trying to find it. Where did you lose it, sir, asked the man. I lost it inside the cottage. The young man was surprised and asked why then are you trying to find it outside the cottage. The old man said ‘I can’t because it is too dark in there.’

If the precious ring of happiness is difficult to find in the darkness of mind, try finding it out in the light of the day. As nobody knows where the heck it is.

Sherlock Holmes is Not Home Now

Sherlock Holmes in his ‘Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle’ finds a hat that has been left by a run-away gentleman. He gives it a thorough examination and tells Watson a number of features about the life and individuality of the wearer. For example, he infers that the man was an intellectual and was fairly well-to-do once but not now. He had the sense of foresight but was a little indifferent now and that his wife probably had ceased to love him. He had a haircut recently and applies lime cream in his hair and leads a sedentary life. Also that he does not probably have gas in his house. Later when Holmes happened to meet him, most of his inferences drawn from closely observing his hat turned out to be fairly accurate. The size of the hat implied that the wearer had a large brain under it and the style and condition of the hat told of the age of the hat and the expensive taste of the owner who now couldn’t afford to replace it even when it was badly battered, tainted with wax and spotted with sweat and cream.

Holmes exercised his detective skills in the late 19^th century, when life was still by and large true to how it appeared. You could trust things as they happened to show up. But with the rise of free enteprise and technology, deception has become such an accessible and rampant practice that Holmes, if he were in business today, would, for the better part of his occupation, remain befuddled. He would give up his logical talent and invent new ways to work out the crimes of thieving and murder. Because, appearance are consciously constructed to confound others these days.

When we were young, elderly people with long flowing beard and a white headgear were considered saintly, venerable and morally upright. Today we have their videos of groping and hugging women who in desperation had come to them for help. The so-called Swamis, Babas and  Fathers lead a double life which, until someone takes the lid off, maintains a well-protected sacred profile. Their religious rhetoric may be about promoting spiritual well-being, but underlying motives can be encouraging donations, exhorting conversions or wielding political power. The politicians of the day, too, are highly adept at this game and are the most difficult to comprehend. Their rhetoric may sound uplifting, promising, progressive and even morally pious, yet it can be all gas, lies and bluff – a typical doublespeak. Worse is, they have the temerity of admitting later that it was all but a way of saying.

Once lies or deceit was the preserve of crooks, but over the years it has so consistently percolated down to the ordinary level that we have ceased to believe what we see or hear. The beggar at the curb may have an amputated limb, but in actual be a healthy man with enormous earnings stashed under his carpet; the handsome looking prospective groom to your daughter may be a conman who will ditch her the moment his designs succeed. The suave, soft-speaking officer or even a doctor may rob you, not directly but through his crony network. The property or investment agents tell you only half the truth to hasten you into a deal. What will Holmes do with such deceptive faces?

We live in tough times. Trust has turned into a liability. We don’t stop for someone to help fearing it may be a trap, particularly if the other person is of the opposite sex. Yet, not every woman with a revealing dress is a harlot, nor every wayside stalker is a sex-maniac. Our old assumptions about ‘face is the index’ have ceased to hold. Masking is an everyday affair. The make-over technology can make an old woman look like a teenager and a ruffian like a gentleman. Dark skin can be turned fair and fair can be turned brown; a glittering set of front teeth can develop canines and the dark eyes can turn blue with a grimace that is both charming and terrifying at the same time. We can’t trust any photograph or video as all images go through a Photoshop, some even get morphed and most get displaced in time and location. The same is true of any voice recording; that is why courts refuse to accept them as valid evidence. Written word was once considered authentic, but what with WhatsApp scriptwriters any line can now be attributed to a Ghalib, Gulzar or even an Einstein.

Technology has made deception so easy and attractive that we have all come to accept it as a way of life. We buy wood that is not wood but looks exactly like that; our leather shoes may look like leather, but in actual be machine-made; the cotton we choose to wear may be cotton only in looks; A fruity drink may not have any fruit at all; the red carrot picked up from a friendly store may have been dyed to look so; the green dot on the packaged food may not ensure that it has no meat in it.  Gelatin or fat in ice creams and health supplements have animal products, but are rarely declared. And the milk and egg on your breakfast plate may have never seen an animal. The list is endless and we have stopped caring for it. The real is becoming increasingly scarce and it gets revealed only after someone explodes the intrigue. 

What would completely stump Holmes is the phenomenon called ‘counterfeiting’. Eminent international brands have given rise to a flourishing industry where fake imitations are produced and sold at one-tenth of the price. (Only connoisseurs with microscopic eye can see the difference) Designs are meticulously copied with slight change in the labels– Rado becomes Radd and Rolex Rolax. More daring counterfeits in the garment, shoes, cosmetic and perfume industry even retain the labels. Interestingly, everyone knows who is doing what, yet no serious effort is being made to stop it. In fact, the brand owners unofficially recognize it as free publicity for their products.

Not that appearances alone will perplex Holmes, but that his entire investigation skills will be rendered useless and laid to rest. Who will need his services for fact-finding when the police are supposed to connive with the offenders?  He will prove a big heckler – a dog in the manger. The criminals now don’t live in the underworld; they walk hand-in-hand with the state. When the state intends neither to fix a crime nor make public the criminals, it is occupationally correct for the police to stop short of investigation and keep their detectives out of the courts.

Holmes, these days, will be twiddling his thumb sitting in some pub.