The Pursuit of Happiness

“The Pursuit of Happyness” is one of my all-time favorite movies. It is a story of trial and triumph enacted poignantly by Will Smith that tugs at my heartstrings every time I watch it. That aside, one fascinating fact I learnt from the film is that the “United States’ Declaration of Independence” assures all its citizens the fundamental right to pursue happiness. What a profound promise that is! Often, in my moments of irrational exuberance about humanity at large, I tell myself that the United Nations Human Rights Council ought to undertake an academic exercise to write a perfect Constitution – one that borrows the best from constitutions of all nations and that line about the “Right to Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness” should be one of the opening statements of that document. (By the way, while we are at it, I also think it is time to change “all men are created equal” to “all life is created equal”).

But how does a nation deliver on its promise to allow its people to pursue happiness? How does one define an amorphous and intangible concept like happiness? I was pondering upon such problematic thoughts one Sunday morning a couple of months ago, while the week’s laundry lazily swirled in the washing machine, when a group of friends dropped by for lunch. After everyone had settled in and enough beer had been had for no question to seem out of context, I hurled that bizarre question at them that no guest expects to be asked over a leisurely lunch – what did happiness mean to them? As expected, the first response I got was a round of bewildered looks that face readers might interpret as “where the hell did that come from”? When I explained that I had been thinking about the words in the American constitution after watching the movie on TV, people got over their initial astonishment and started opening up.

The first answer was firmly grounded in the present moment when Suhas (all names changed) said that happiness to him was a lazy lunch on a Sunday afternoon talking rubbish with friends over chilled beer. All of us agreed with him, even as we delved deeper into the concept. What we all knew and was re-affirmed was that happiness meant different things to different people – to Priya, it was the recent moment when she learnt that she had got a much awaited promotion (she defined it more broadly as achieving goals she set for herself); to Shekhar it was the experience of fatherhood; Urmi found happiness in being by herself and playing the guitar (she is the mother of four-year old twins); her husband – Amit, who is a motor bike junkie, is happiest when he is riding his Harley Davidson on the national highway early in the morning with his fellow members of the Harley owners’ club; or when he is playing with his children. In the meanwhile, Suhas thought some more (beyond his opening comment of having beer with friends on Sunday afternoon) and added that the day he felt really happy was when he bought an apartment in his hometown couple of years ago and moved his parents there from the rented place they were in earlier…. It was a fun conversation and like all such conversations it ended without any of us really knowing when it did – we had moved on to other topics and some more beer.

But the thought stayed with me. After they left in the early evening and I sat with my customary cup of tea in the balcony (like I mostly do on Sunday evenings), I started re-playing the conversation in my head and processing what it all meant. The first insight I got was a real revelation – no one spoke of things money buys. No gadgets, clothes, shoes, cars. Even when things that can be bought with money were mentioned – like Amit’s Harley Davidson motor bike or Suhas’ apartment – they were means to achieve a larger end – the pursuit of a passion in the case of Amit and the well-being of his parents, in Suhas’ case. What about myself, I thought? So many “things” made me happy – the iPhone I recently bought, the car, the fancy music system, the list goes on. But then I realized that these things didn’t really make me happy – I was either trying to have something that no one else in my circle had or I was trying to have something that everyone else in my circle already had. That was my first insight on happiness – we spend too much time and resources trying to catch up or stay ahead of others and that can never be a source of happiness. Happiness comes from knowing and pursuing what we want for ourselves and enhancing our sense of self-worth.

Armed with that initial insight, I started thinking of the things I really wanted for myself, things that truly make me happy. The answers came easy – I enjoy life experiences – parasailing on the sea during sunset, walking on a quaint, cobbled street by a massive lake whose end can’t be seen, watching some mesmerizing live performances or, like I did yesterday, swimming in the rain. The memories of such moments stay etched in my mind and make me happy long after they are over. I also cherish relationships – I may not have a lot of friends but I have deep, strong bonds with the ones I have. Nothing makes me happier than spending time with people whose company I enjoy. I identified a few others – like pursuing some of my interests, being able to contribute to my work and people around me positively and so on.

The biggest realization that listing the things that made me happy brought was that almost none of it had to do with career success. Here I was, spending an inordinate amount of time defining and pursuing career goals when what I really should have been doing was to define and pursue life goals. Life is too short to start living after one’s career is over. In fact, for some unfortunate people (and who knows, I may be one of them), life runs out even before their career is over. A career is not entirely unimportant – after all, it is a source of self-worth but it is one of the sources, surely not the only source. On a similar note, the money that it fetches is important but as I now know only few of the things that make me happy require spending money. And, most of those things, I already have.

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Afterthought: I don’t write this blog very often but enjoy doing so greatly whenever I do. Though it’s quite a challenge to come up with topics and capture random thoughts when they do occur to me. I believe there are many good apps for amateur writers out there. Must buy an iPad one of these days!

Of beginnings and endings

Asha’s seventieth birthday came and went. She neither had the luxury of time nor the will to celebrate such occasions any longer. Not just her birthday, even more frequent, noticeable punctuations of time like days, weeks, months meant nothing to her any more. To her, they were all irrelevant demarcations of time that were spent doing the same thing – going about the prosaic routine of everyday errands and looking after Sunil – the former exhausted her body, the latter drained her soul.

She did notice the passing of seasons though. That was the good thing about moving to Dehradun from Delhi after Sunil’s retirement. In Delhi, where they had lived for little over five years after returning to India from many years of living abroad, there was summer and then there was winter. But in Dehradun, spring and autumn were distinctly noticeable too. So even though she forgot on the thirteenth that it was her birthday, she could feel the month of March in the air. After all, spring was here favorite season – the chilling winds that descended from the hills in the winter had transformed into a gentle breeze, the sun shone brightly but had none of the unbearable harshness that it would soon exhibit, leaves started to show up on the barren branches of the tall eucalyptus trees that dotted the street outside their house and best of all – flowers had started blooming in their neighbor’s garden. Asha could not see them from across the wall but she could smell their subtle fragrance in the air. By contrast, her own garden lay bare. The gardener, who worked at the nearby Forest Research Institute during the week, came every Sunday and mowed the lawn to ensure it did not turn into a bush infested with insects and rodents but that was all – she had little energy and lesser interest to plant saplings and grow them. The cane chairs and center table that Sunil had bought from Delhi’s Mehrauli-Gurgaon road, after enthusiastic searching and astute bargaining, were now dumped at the back of the garage instead of being laid out in the small portico that stood between the garden and rest of the house. For Asha, they had lost all purpose; they were just one more thing that she had to remind the domestic help to dust and clean once a month at least, a task that the lady whom it was assigned to was only too happy to forget. Life wasn’t always like this though.

Sometimes, at night, closing her eyes after flipping through a new book on crocheting (the only distraction she indulged in these days. Though she never got down to it, she read up on crocheting and wanted to get back to her hobby) that she would have borrowed from the library of the local club and while drifting through that space that separates wakefulness from sleep, she would think of the wonderful life they had – of her meeting Sunil at St. Stephen’s college in Delhi where she had enrolled for her Bachelor’s degree in English Literature (he was already on to his Master’s program in Political Science when she joined), their fairytale romance that made her friends jealous, Sunil’s getting his dream job in the India Foreign Service, their subsequent marriage, the many job assignments for which Sunil was posted in many countries and their eventual return to Delhi, where Sunil discharged his duties in the Ministry of External Affairs for the last five years of his career. It was not as if she thought of these things every day but every now and then the fifty odd years of life that they had spent together came back to her mind in bits and pieces. Well, not really; she seldom thought of the thirteen years they had now spent in Dehradun. It was as if her mind had played a mischief by inversing her reservoir of memories – the farther things were back in time, the more vividly she recollected them, the more recent the memory, the more obscure it seemed.

The last bit that she recalled was about their decision to move to Dehradun. Although they had lived in Delhi for five years after coming back to India, they could never really call it home. The city had changed a lot since the time they lived there as students and they found little of that change palatable. As a torchbearer of a new, upwardly mobile India, the city seemed so confident about its future that it almost seemed in a hurry to forget its past; so eager to create a new identity for itself that it had happily compromised its character along the way. Philosophical disconnect aside, it was way too big and chaotic for them. Sunil often joked with friends and colleagues that after many years in the quieter parts of the world (especially around Europe), it was back home in Delhi that he truly understood what the feeling of alienation can be like. So as soon as he retired they bought some land in Dehradun and meticulously went about building the house that would be their final address. They chose Dehradun because it seemed like an affable city – not too small, not too big; it mostly had good weather and it was close to Delhi. Apart from that, one big reason why they chose Dehradun was because of its proximity to the hills. The Garhwals were no Alps but there was something reassuring in the knowledge that they would spend the autumn of their lives looking at the quiet majesty of mountains. Thankfully, the highway between Delhi and Dehradun was now a well laid one with six lanes and they happily moved to Dehradun knowing that it was only a comfortable four hour drive to Delhi whenever they missed friends, family (the few, distant ones they had), the general cacophony of a big city and most important of all – reliable healthcare.

The house was everything they wanted it to be. They spent weeks, in some cases – months, looking for the right furniture, choosing different color schemes for the walls to suit the room, buying upholstery and linen to match the color schemes. And to top it all, they had their collection of curio from all across the world, aesthetically placed in nooks and corners. In size, it wasn’t as large as some of the other houses in the neighborhood but visitors could easily tell that its owners were people of refined taste.

They quickly built a network of friends too. It happened easily once they became a member of the local club. Sunil would go there to play tennis every morning. Most evenings they would go together for a couple of hours for a walk by the lawns, followed by a cup of tea with friends once the sun set, sometimes staying back a little longer to catch up on reading at the library or watching TV in the lounge if anything eventful was happening in the world. On Fridays and Saturdays they usually stayed late – chatting up with the other couples over drinks and dinner. If they weren’t at the club on weekends, they would be at one of their friend’s place or people would be coming over to theirs. It was the predictable post-retirement life that educated, upper middle class people wish for – predictably uneventful and predictably good.

So it was for the first five years until one day while sitting at their portico and having tea in the morning after Sunil returned from tennis, Asha noticed that Sunil’s hands were shaking and unusually unstable. She asked him what was wrong and he dismissed her by saying his hands tremble every now and then and it would be alright in a while. However, it never did. She saw them like that whenever she bothered to look till it reached a point couple of months later when it started disturbing her mind enough to press him to visit the local doctor. The doctor investigated, conducted tests and finally concluded that what Sunil was experiencing was the early stages of Parkinson's disease. He gave some medicines and exercises and asked Sunil to not exert himself too much while playing tennis. According to the doctor, so long as Sunil followed these instructions, he would be fine. So he seemed to be for a couple of years but in reality the disease was tightening its grip on him. One day, Sunil announced that he is hanging up his tennis racket for good. Asha only half believed him when he said that his friends were getting old and the games were no longer fast paced enough to be fun. But he continued to get worse. Things would fall from his hand, he would suddenly lose balance while getting up from the sofa, he started losing control over his facial expressions and his physical movements became visibly slow and clumsy.

Ultimately one day, three years after the doctor in Dehradun had detected Sunil to be suffering from Parkinson’s disease, Asha insisted they visit a good doctor in Delhi and this time, Sunil didn’t resist very strongly. After a battery of tests and diagnostics, Dr. Dinakaran, who was the Head of the department of Neurology at All India Institute of Medical Sciences, told them what they already knew – that Sunil was suffering from Parkinson’s disease. But he also said something that they weren’t expecting to hear – that he was somewhere between stage two and three of the disease and typically it was a quick road downhill from here. Though it worried them, neither confessed it to the other. In fact, on the way back to Dehradun, Sunil was more than his jovial self. He even took a dig at Dr. Dinakaran by saying that in their urge to be candid and pragmatic, these south Indian doctors often ended up as morbid and alarmist. A Punjabi doctor would never raise such false alarms, he laughingly told Asha.

But Dr. Dinakaran was right. Sunil kept getting worse. He found it difficult to climb stairs and shifted to the guest bedroom on the ground floor. He needed help to walk, found it difficult to hold the coffee mug, his head would slightly nod all the time and his thought and speech became more and more muddled. It was as if his entire body was becoming paralytic, but in agonizingly slow pace – one tiny muscle at a time. Eventually, two years later, he became completely bed-ridden. Asha found it impossible to look after him by herself. She arranged for nurses from the local hospital to come and stay with him – initially during the night then eventually through the day as well. Sunil lost control over his bladder, his memory, his speech and his ability to eat. The local doctor put him on saline drip but there was little else to do.

Asha could not bear to look at him. So much so that one day she felt a sudden anger towards Dr. Dinakaran for telling them that it was a quick road downhill. She wanted to meet him only to tell him that it had been four years since they had visited him, this journey was anything but quick. She wanted to ask him how far was the end, how deep the abyss, how much worse would it get? The truth is Asha was dying as much as Sunil was, only vicariously. Her entire day was spent only in ensuring he was being looked after and ensuring the house didn’t fall apart. She had no one to talk to except the maid, nurses and the gardener who came on Sundays. Initially, their friends would drop by often but their visits decreased as the days went by. Some of them would call once in a while though. The only thing that gave her some respite were the books on crocheting that she read and the thought that one day she must resurrect that hobby of her younger days.

Couple of months after Asha’s seventieth birthday and eight years after he was first detected with Parkinson’s disease, Sunil died. It was a gentle passing away and not a dramatic end. Sunil died as he had lived. He had been lying in coma for a few days and his life slipped away. When the doctor came to issue the death certificate, he put an approximate time on the document because the real time was not known to anyone.

The next few days were a whirlwind – some family came, most of whom Asha had not seen in years. Some of them even stayed back at their house for a couple of nights. Since they had come all the way from Delhi, they decided to make a short vacation out of it and went to visit Mussoorie as well. All the friends were around for her – they came every day and stayed back till late in the evening, leaving only after ensuring she had had her dinner and was ready to go to bed. The first thirteen days, which is the time till when rituals lasted, passed like this.

On the fourteenth day, no one came except the maid for a couple of hours to do the chores. For the first time in decades, in her life perhaps, Asha felt she understood what the phrase “the unbearable lightness of being” coined her favorite writer – Milan Kundera – really meant. It was as if she had suddenly put by the wayside a heavy weight she had been carrying on her head for an immeasurable length of time. She felt light but in a discomforting sort of way.

When she woke up the next day, she realized for the first time that Sunil was gone for ever, that her life would never be the same again, that things were returning to normal but it was not the normal she knew; it was a new kind of normal. For the first time, she wept. Strangely, when she was done crying she also felt a faint quiver of happiness in her heart. It shocked her, it embarrassed her but it was unmistakably there. She ignored it, made herself a big mug of black coffee and did something she had been intending to do for many years – she took out the bag from her cupboard that contained the crocheting tools she had been quietly collecting the last couple of years – needles, yarn, hooks, measuring tape and all. She sat on the study table next to the large window in her bedroom, looking out on a warm May morning and started crocheting after a gap of many decades. There she was – crocheting and sipping her black coffee. It was only when she was having her third or fourth sip that Asha noticed something she had never seen before – her hands were trembling; they were shaky and unstable just as Sunil’s had been after he had returned from a game of tennis one morning eight years ago.