Malcontents Galore

We complain and grumble for what we have not--we grumble about our problems but hardly do anything to ameliorate those,...indeed we are a land of malcontents. A topper in his respective school comes and falters in college, and is constantly unhappy. Love blooms and withers…brewing unhappiness. The system fails…and we grumble at the government. We speak of equality, but will not let our children mingle with our housekeeper’s child. We know what is happening in the lives of others, but have hardly a moment to spend with our own family—especially (about) the elderly. We, the so-called Gen-Y know the minutest details regarding the personal lives of Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie but have hardly heard of Anandaram Baruah and Chandraprasad Saikia. We are constantly grumbling, at the lack of this that and the other, but how many of us have utilized all that is on offer? Standing on the holy sands of Rameswaram the young Avul Pakir had dreamt of flying: to any skeptic it would then have seemed a child's flight of fancy. However, the young boy not merely flew up in the sky—but soared higher to give the country a leading edge in its missile technology and went on to become the First citizen of the world's greatest democracy. Instances as this are to be found everywhere around us, but we how often have we taken inspiration from all these? For we are "so messed up with our lives" and "so burdened with our problems " that we "have no time for all this inspirational talk”, and so our lives are “doomed into despair"--making us the malcontents that we are. However, this realistic appraisal of our lives confronts us on surprisingly very few occasions. life offers so many diversions today that we can safely tuck our desperation/discontent somewhere behind the many corners of our minds—while immersing ourselves in the ‘joys of life’—the ‘dross and tinsel’ of modern life. All the while as we are dissatisfied within. Spirituality, yoga, meditation and music are some of the avenues through which we can rest our wearied nerves—yet, even these come in neat packages of commercialization: in this age of globalisation (unfortunately) we end up in servitude to prevailing trends and the demands of the market. Exceptions are hard to come by; the existing ones are labeled ‘different’in a sense that is anything but positive. Thus, we can only say that a whole set of socio-economic-cultural-psychological factors are at work forming an intricate web that makes us run in a vicious circle which both begins and ends in dissatisfaction/a weariness making us a society of malcontents galore…to come out of this rut—all we need to is to break the shackles of conformity to norms and dare to think and act a tad differently…For (the saying goes)—“winners do not do different things, they do things differently”. Let’s turn around the connotation of “being different”—once we are freed from our narrowed paradigms, we will begin to see things clearly and stop grumbling but start acting proactively….

stuti goswami