The wide arrays of topics that I want to cover are being constrained due to the main factor called ‘time’. My previous post had ‘sustainability’, as a key opening stanza. When I am traveling or working I think ‘this-is-what’ is going to be my next post on and start to frame ideas between the ears. Some how, it doesn’t materialize at the time of delivery.

One of these days while working, I met an interesting Australian character. When I say interesting I mean it in literal sense. Its out-of-the-equation that an Aussies can be interesting. She was one of the customers who never left the frame even after my service, without me responding to her “namaste” & “shukriya”. I thought it was not decent to reply back in Hindi, since there were other customers who were waiting behind her. She was a woman in her late thirties or may be even early forties.

In the end I was compelled to thank her in the same way as proportionate to the “No worries mate” or “cheers” or “Taa” that’s used here in normality, when someone thanks or appreciates you for your help. “So you know hindi?!” I asked her. “Ohh, offcourse I do. I love India. I go there every year. Beautiful country, amazing people…I simply patronage them” was the reply. I asked her for the reasons and the conversation grew a little more than expected.

“I know you people want to be like us. But there is no life here to tell you the truth. When there are options in life there can be no life. I don’t know why all of you are hell-bent on this”. From one angle I was astonished by her benefaction and from the other side I was made to think more on the lines she conveyed. I couldn’t get the actuality behind her words. It can be interpreted in two ways.

Firstly you can think that India is a country where there are no options available to a entity, which makes him glued to one form of life that ‘has-to’ make him to happy; so he is happy. So this takes an inversely proportionate assumption that there are lot of options else where, which may not be all together a reality. Secondly, she might have addressed the simplicity of the existence there. If she has addressed that, then may be there is a rational meaning which more and more people are believing in nowadays.

This happened before two weeks and I am stuck up with this thought for a while now. I know the fundamental ethos of this subject matter revolves around an ‘idealism’ point of view. The problem with idealism is that, it differs to person-to-person. What may be ideal or superlative for me may not be the same to you. So when I compare my idealist notions with another mortal soul he sees a variance in priority or preference.

This is a much more dubious topic than I have put forward. The notion of idealism revolves around the same topic of ‘benchmarking’; if only it can be measurable. Say for instance if I say, hypothetically, I want to sing like Harish Raghavendra; then it means I have benchmarked myself with someone idealistic for me. But the ‘benchmarked’ may not be ideal for someone else, so the rationality in the subject matter disappears out of the equation. So benchmarking cannot be rational unless it’s agreed upon by a group of individual working on a given project, for example lot of organizations have extensive benchmarking practices.

But in the given context we are debating over benchmarking ‘life’. According to me life cannot be benchmarked. Beware, I am not trying to say what we achieve or do in life cannot be benchmarked rather I am trying to say life itself cannot be benchmarked. Instance I have heard lot of people saying that America is the most idealistic place for me to live in. I want to live my life there since it’s in accordance with my wants and needs. So the basic fact is that the process can be benchmarked and not the entity.

Considering such a situation there is a big problem which arises. You have to assess all the considerable options, and then will be the time when you can benchmark upon something, since then you can asses the relatively of a better existence than the given situation you are in. That means this individual knows about the life in Papa New Guinea or in all countries which form the globe to form his benchmarking on the US.

Most of us get influenced by the terms called ‘peer-pressure’ or ‘branding’, that we forget sometimes what we really need in life. To conclude for me life or anything for that matter, shouldn’t be made comparative to a greater extent. You can make it look beautiful regardless of whether you are in Uganda or Rwanda or New York City.

Go on, make it beautiful!


Filtered by Sambhar…..