Assume you are a person, a working professional with an annual salary of, let’s say, 12 lakhs. Take a hypothetical situation where in your work-life balance is pretty stabilised and you have a good family background too – both socially and economically. Also, you have a sound health and good personality that increases your chances of staying on a positive trajectory of your life and career goals. Till now, from what we have assumed you are probably the top cream of today’s youth.
Imagine one day I tell you, you should keep this 1 biscuit daped in paper in your bag for emergency situations. You will laugh at me. If arrogant, you might just hit me in my face for making such a rude joke to you. I mean, why on earth, will you ever be in such a situation where 1 biscuit will be so important to you? Logical right?
Few things, though rare are beyond the normal explanations of logic and calculations. Life can throw weird tantrums at you. It can give you momentary happiness like a King and also throw your face down in the dust to understand what being low really means. We generally set a minimum low for ourselves in our own lives. By that, I mean, the lowest our expectations or realities can get. For example, you with a salary of 12 lpa and a good family background might not even think of a situation where you need to struggle for a square meal of the day. We generally do not make such considerations in our lives.
And when these expectations dip below our minima levels, we become anxious, depressed, stressed and emotionally shattered. it really takes a long time for us to come to terms to what actually happened. We keep assuming that this is probably some dream which will rewind to its real world in some time. But that never happens. Because that is never supposed to happen.
But it does happens. More often than not, we try to overlook it as a lesson. We consider it a mishap and move on. It is like losing a free lesson granted to you by life. Have you not faced a situation where you had probably a lot of money in your wallet but still could not get a cab late night? You had lot of money, you were hungry, but could not get a plate of good food? You had all resources to hire a room for your stay but had to move from lodge to lodge and finally satisfy with waiting on the railway station? Had an experience? Yes – Good! No – Be ready for one, it might just be round the corner.
Such experience confront you to tell you, nothing is low or high, these are just contexts and relative measurements. What you believe to be an affordable somehow livable lifestyle maybe the life long dream for some and what you consider to be very high goals, maybe for someone it is of no use! Nothing in this world should be seen with an eye of disgust. While biking through the road, you come across that beggar near the waste and the stench, do not ignore it like a bad omen. Think about it for a moment. Is there any thing you can do to improve atleast one hour of that person?
I have realised it off late and I really feel guilty about it. In the past two weeks I have given water to a person who was lying on the roadside and arranged a full meal for 2 kids wandering around begging. Not that I did something great, maybe most of us reading this also would have done things better than that. Just that, I realised it very late that it is very horrible to be there. Standing in their shoes for a splitsecond try imagining the world. Do not just woo away thinking they are used to it. No one is used to eating waste food from a dust bin, no one is used to sleeping on the road side after being drunk. Its just that there is no respite.
We are all queens and kings of our own lives. Our offsprings, will mostly be treated like princess and princes. But always, remember that life and destiny are experts in De-throning even the greatest people on earth and we, for them, are no ones! So, let’s adopt modesty in what we have and accept and be grateful to all people around us.
Always Ranting, Rantzaada.
The 11 o' clock diary 