Happiness

Since the last few days I found myself getting disturbed over insignificant instances and felt that it happens with each one of us. Therefore, one fine morning I thought of tracing happiness. I went through a journey to find it in a cottage, village, sea shore, mountains as I just wanted to find out where does happiness dwell. Does it lie in riches, strength, power or nowhere? A strange fact came in limelight which revealed that happiness has a history and a voyage of its own.  At infancy, a child finds maximum happiness in the mother’s lap. He grows, happiness walks along with him and he gets attracted towards toys and other objects. Mothers keep on screaming “come here” but he keeps on playing with the toys and at that point of time he does not like the mother’s voice as it disturbs him.  As the child grows his happiness is in his friends and other materialistic things. He further grows, gets a lucrative job, marries a beautiful woman, has beautiful children, buys a luxury car, a big house and he is happy. This is a normal corridor of happiness. However, everything does not move by the standard conventions created by us. Every journey gets interrupted and so is the journey of happiness. As soon as we face hurdles we are unhappy.   

Happiness is the sign of life. To be happy you need to have desires. You cannot progress if you do not have Desires. Desires make you run for your name, fame, money, and power. Once you are on the runway you reach at a point from where you want to fly.  You keep on achieving one or the other goal of your life but always think of more and that is prosperity. If you have no desire you are a dead soul, and the world forgets you. You are neither in the present nor in the future. No desire means death. Even God was happy when he created this wonderful world; he created the earth, the vast sea, thick forests, beautiful flowers, deserts and untouchable mountains. He admires his own creations. As we always admire our own home and want to listen from every mouth the word of appreciation. But the world does not move according to our wishes and charms and has its own course to follow.  Just if somebody does not have a high regard for us we become unhappy develop complexes, shut over selves in cocoons.  We forget that everyone has carved his own trail of his happiness and ambitions which necessarily may not match with ours. Therefore let’s be with our own desires to be alive and fill our life with happiness.  It takes a fraction of a second to be unhappy, if our body and mind are unhealthy happiness walks away. Hence to be happy we need to respect ourselves.

 Just imagine when desires change into passion we start planting the tree of hatred. This is where imbalance occurs; we choose to be corrupt, cut shortcuts, cut the roots of others. Have desires but also gain inner strength to face failures and let the happiness take its own natural path; it dwells inside us.

Just think of a child who has lost his mother, no food to eat, no shelter, he spends whole life on the footpath and finally dies. He has no desire as he cannot afford to have desires. His happiness lies in two time meals, in the shelter of a tree, few clothes, which some rich man has donated to him.  Every journey is not smooth but happiness lies even in uneven paths and depends upon how you perceive it. To me happiness is our inner strength and we have to make constant efforts to build it. During all these years I have struggled for one thing or the other but now believe it was all was futile. I now think why to be passionate but still have not achieved a saintly approach towards life. This may be the reason that I am not happy for many things for many days. No outer source can help me it has to come from inside I have to slay the “ME” which is residing so deeply inside me, once this me will go I will become happy as the whole world will be mine and happiness will be scattered ubiquitously.

My daughter’s birthday

I am sitting alone in my home. It is drizzling. Today is the 7th of August. On this day my little princess arrived from a paradise. It is a well known saying that a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step; hence 7th August was the first drop in the ocean of happiness for me. Roughly three decades have passed, but the day you were born is still as fresh as it was yesterday. Your birth and all the past years are like a favorite movie which I can watch over and over again.  Along with your birth came many challenges. How seconds changed into minutes, hours, days, years and finally you grew and have started leading your own life. You have gone very far from me but still there is a cord which keeps pulling both of us towards each other. There are few moments which I will never forget.  Your first touch, I felt a strange kind of warmth which was different from any other hug. Your cries made me nervous. You proved to be a great teacher for me.

You taught me many things from the day I conceived. You started telling me, slow down mom otherwise I will get hurt, you taught me to feel the change in myself and enjoy it. You told me I am a part of you and growing inside you, you gave me confidence and told me mom changes are always good as they indicate my growth. It is you who told me to feel the waves but not get sunken into these deep tides of water. You taught me that time never stops hence move along with it. It is because of you that I am alive.

As a mother I felt I should allow you to do the things you love, to grow, evolve, move in the direction of your dreams, and create your own space. It is said that a mother daughter relationship is the best relationship with least intergenerational gaps. I understood this only after you started growing up. The teen age rebellion approached you also and I had a tough time but as you crossed that age a common understanding started building between both of us and now we are good friends.

You are gone very far away like any other grown up daughter. I never ever wanted you to stay so far from me but again I have to respect your feelings and concerns. But no one can stop me from memorizing your laughs, your jokes and your plans to see me happy. I still remember the day when you started looking at a match for me in the matrimonial section of the news papers and wanted me to remarry. I remember you selected a few matches for me and wanted to send my bio data along with a photograph. You brought an old album and selected a photograph to send but it was not to your satisfaction. Upon my assertiveness to leave the idea of remarriage as I loved your father very deeply and will never be happy with any other man, you dropped this idea.  Now that you are far away, I feel lonely and say every day and miss you tremendously. I miss your laugh, your jokes, and your smile; miss your tickling to make me laugh. In the night I forget that you are not there most of the times and search for you on the bed and call your name. Today is your birthday and I am missing you, I am recollecting your child hood days. The month of August used to be very special for both of us.  New clothes, new shoes, and dining out on this day were our agenda.  In this materialistic world the only treasure I have is you as my darling daughter. Whenever I am sad I think of you and the emptiness surrounding tends to disappear. Talking to you on the phone makes my day. People feel strange that we talk to each other both in the morning and also in the evening.  Today is your birthday and I have promised not to be sad as you are always with me. Over and above that I know that now there is someone to serve you a fairy cake with a candle on your birthdays. I pray to God that he remains with you till you live, that this someone special may always be there to hold your hand. All these memories, wishes and prayers are the gift of the day from me to you. I hope you will like it. I have not narrated this note of mine to you on 7th of August while wishing you Happy Birthday as I knew that after reading it your eyes will get moist which I never want to happen on this special day.

Visit to Chandigarh

After a gap of almost 7 years I visited Chandigarh. My own town, although no body lives there now, but some times you develop relationships with roads, trees, mandirs and many other non-living things.  Living and non-living things was a class 6^th chapter. I remember mugging up the differences between living and non- living things. But today I feel how redundant are these differences. You may love the brick house as much as you love your own parents as all your childhood memories are attached with that brick house. You may adore the zigzag roads through which you have gone to your school.

During this trip I visited my old school in sector- 18, sector 17 market, the rose garden and walked through the roads of sector16. In the rose garden once my daughter fell into the rose bushes. I tried to locate those bushes where she fell. I can still remember the tears in my husband's  eyes No where I could find those bushes. I still remember these bushes  were having many small white roses. That day Swati was also wearing a frilly white frock. When I was lost in searching those bushes a young man came and asked me "Have you lost some thing?" Instantly, I replied yes. He offered me help to find it but I replied "no son, you will not be able to hit upon it as it was lost 37 years back". He looked at me with strange eyes.

When I was studying in Punjab University my nieces and nephews were very small. I think I was their gang leader. On any cloudy day I would pull out my bike and ask them to go to Sukhna lake. Everybody use to be quite thrilled, especially my eldest niece. We use to go biking enjoying almost everything. They all knew that Bua always has money and they can put forward their demands. I use to fullfill their desires. On this trip, I took an auto and went to Sukhna lake  and could feel the presence of all children around me asking me  "Bua, ice cream,  golgappas, Bhutta. I sat on a bench for some time and finally realized that there is no one there to make these demands. All the kids are married and have their own children. I am now old. Some street boy called me Dadi and requested me for some money for eating something. I searched for money and found the smallest note with me was of 100 Rupees. I gave him that and told him to have whatever he wanted. He was a little astonished but how could he comprehend what was going on inside me. A short trip of 7 days made me realize that the days pass away and every day we get older and older and finally the final destination will also arrive. More so at this age I could finally understand the difference between the living and non living things. NON LIVING THINGS remain forever while living things shrivel and grow older and older and you carry the big burden of memories like a huge sand bag with some small sand particles and some pebble stones. Some fine memories remain so deep rooted that you want to keep in touch with them.

Out of the fine memories are the ones which I experience whenever I visit my eldest niece who stays in Gurgaon. She is a big boss in a big company but for me she is still a little child who used to accompany me to sector 17 in her small frocks, used to run and say "catch Bua catch", and get scared at my scoldings. She still remembers that her Bua likes Kulfi.  If I am in Gurgaon and she comes home on time she makes it a mandate to take me to a kulfi shop and get me the big sized kulfi. I do not know how much it costs. But in my eyes it costs million of dollars as I can see the contented smile on her face.