Life is very Iffy

Hey ppl...

This is an excerpt from an article I wrote for The Times Of India...a few days back...
Basically deals with my first hand encounter with life, per se....and itz penchant for being so Iffy...Here goes...


Life is fraught with surprises.

1. It can be a “split second effect” that could sheer away the course of one’s life profoundly. It has taught me an important lesson; a lesson that is omnipotent per se. Something that has always been there at the back of our mind, but which, we fail to appreciate. It goes like this, if life has given us “scads” of problems to deal with, it has also given “scads” x “scads” of positive factors for which it is modest enough not to claim. This proposition succeeds the aftermath of an incident that has changed my life; “an accident” would be the mot juste for it. I’m an Ex-army officer, Ex-NDA, Ex-IMA; career was proliferating with a lot of dispatch, did well in the academies, was doing well in the courses…prognosticated to go up high on the ladder. But one “split second effect”, maybe destiny, maybe human error, maybe “just life”, changed everything.
2. It was a grungy road accident, brought to the hospital dead, unconscious and in the land of nod for 10 days right through the “Tsunami”. Realized on waking up, that the right hand (and shoulder) was ‘missing in action’. But then again, within seconds the unconscious mind performed a “status check”.
(i) are your legs okay ?---------Yes
(ii) Can you see?----------------- Yes
(iii) Can you sing, can you see the beautiful colors of life, can you smell the rose, can you think of walking on the beaches bare foot…...can you listen to the birds singing on the trees?

I pondered over it and said------------Yes to all!! There had been so many possibilities, what if I had lost both the hands, or both the legs, or maybe damaged my eyes? What if it was supposed to be a combination of the foregoing? I was much better off with one loss.

3. There’s a commonly observed phenomenon. We do not appreciate the value of something till it’s gone; nay we take things for granted. Be it our close relatives, our peers, our friends, or in this case a limb, with which we have spent our entire life (pun intended). We put up plausible arguments that life is unfair, the opulent are so jammy and the penurious, unconscionably hapless. The fact is, life is very much fair - to the core. Ratio of the encumber of problems is always constant. What varies is the degree. Everybody gets their whack of the deal. A person might be filthy rich, but along with that comes the “hidden cons”; the side that is not diaphanous to the world; factors which augment on to the already present trammels. On the other hand a person might be very poor as per his paraphernalia, but accordingly the kind of problems life has tasked him to deal with are of a lesser intensity as compared to the foregoing.

4. The essence of all this is that instead of being crotchety about what life has taken away from us; we should exult over what we have in hand, on ground!! If we don’t have something that others have, or maybe lost something that others still have, then instead of being rueful, be chuffed over what “we have”. Always look at the positive side. For example, if somebody filches away my wallet, I should be happy that it carried only 300 bucks, or maybe forgot to keep my ATM in it, which is still safe at home. We say “tomorrow never comes”, but how can we be sure that when it comes, we would always have, what ‘we have’? The best way to live life the way it was meant to be is, instead of fretting over what we don’t have, we should rather appreciate what life has given us, be buoyant and work towards firm goals. There is no limit to human desire; there will never come a time when a man would say, “Okay, I have everything now, I don’t want anything from life”. We have to just open our eyes, appreciate the varied form of life and always remember the aphorism,

“Never give up on life, and life will never give up on you”