A couple of days back I was talking about how sometimes ethics and helping someone might push you to an uncomfortable choice between them. I even gave an example of a story about a Barber who is driven to make a similar choice when the Dictator of his country walks into his shop for a shave. You can read that story here: Just Lather, That’s All

Today I got an wonderful example of the exact opposite situation. This one was thanks to a beautiful short story, The Missing Mail from the book Malgudi Days by R.K. Narayan.  The televised version of the story is embedded below (If you cant see it, you can view the video here: Malgudi Days: The Missing Mail)

The story is about a postman and one of the families of Malgudi. The postman is a wonderful man and is present at every important instance of the life of Kamakshi, the daughter of the family. When its time for her marriage, he also helps in finding the perfect groom for her.

A couple of days before the wedding the postman sees that the family has a letter informing them that the uncle of the bride is critically ill. The next day he receives a mail that the uncle has passed away. Fearing the marriage might get postponed, the postman takes the call of not informing the family until the ceremonies are well past.

This again was similar predicament but handled in a different way, but the things at stake were different… Ironically in both stories(the other one being of the barber) the final choice seems more acceptable for the reader. I believe its in interest of the writer to work in favor of the reader’s sentiment.

If the postman had done his job and delivered the letter it wouldn’t have been a good story. In choosing a different path the writer suddenly added depth to the character and whats more gave the audience what they wanted.

Thats the important distinction between stories and life. Stories are sometimes over simplified to meet the reader halfway. In that simplification the writer makes the call as to what details are important to the reader but you don’t get that choice in life, all details are there and you make the final call.

So where does that leave us… In all the pondering on this topic the one certainty that I encountered was that its impossible to judge what is the best choice. Its also important to realize that the maker of the decision probably had different priorities than you…

Hemanth left a wonderful comment in the last post, there he says:

How you feel is relevant only to you, but what you do (even as a result of how you feel) is relevant to everyone around you ….. the hard truth. So i guess it comes down to saying,either … i am going to play this one for me, or…. i am going to play this one for someone/everyone else.

Its amazing how true and well put that is…

You have the power to cure all the world’s diseases but the price for this is that you must kill a single innocent child, could you kill that child?

Thats the question asked by the protagonist during the climax of Swordfish… I have thought about that question many times, asked it to a few ppl too… Frankly, the answer might tell you something about yourself; About if you can in metaphorical terms ‘pull the trigger’ when the time comes… But what is usually ignored is that, this question is not entirely complete…

The amount of information given is very small compared to what is put at stake… One might wonder about what is to happen to the child after being spared or what about the people of the world, will they live forever? But that actually also does not matter… the question is just a test… there is not child in harms way or no cure for all world’s diseases…

But what if you have the choice to choose between an ethical compromise and helping someone?

What if someone approached you to help some deeply in need. Your heart goes out for the person in need but you doubt the authenticity of the person in front of you. Would you extend you hand to help them knowing full well that you might be getting conned or would you walk away knowing somewhere in your heart that you possibly refused to help someone who direly needed your help.

You might consider weighing your options… but what if the decision has to be made at the moment?

Lets raise the stakes…

What if the help is not insignificant for you? What if your help would be a huge boost for the person in need?

Thinking? Lets see how far we can go with this

What if the help is very significant for you? What if your help would could save someone’s life?

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I read a short story a long time back, it was about a barber who was visited by the Dictator of the land. He had in his hand the sharp blade and in front of him the throat of a tyrant who had tortured and destroyed his country. Professional ethics dictated that he do his job and not be biased the political situation…

What would you have done?

During the entire time he is shaving the Dictator’s beard, the barber mentally tries to make the decision… In the end, he does his job. The Dictator walks away a clean shaven man…

So did the Barber make the right call?

I believe, the amount of information given is very small compared to what is put at stake…

Twitter and Facebook have steadily become attractive replacements for blogging. Twitter’s 140 character “in the moment” microblogging allows immediate feedback, people respond almost immediately to a funny quote while back during blogging’s prime you would have to wait until ppl checked their RSS aggregator or did their ritualistic daily visit to your blog. Facebook provides an easier and seemingly more attractive alternative, dont know what to say but still want to appreciate the author… hit the “like” button and you are done.

Facebook and Twitter’s allure is also biased for the reason that they have slowly become the one stop spot for everything. With people sharing in the same sites there is hardly a need to remember blog URLs or keep in track of multiple sites… A long time back this very feature made livejournal my choice of blogging platform but now things have changed and my livejournal friend circle is only a shadow of what it was in its prime.

On the bright side, there is a part of me thats thankful for this change. Facebook has given me a lot of readers who otherwise would never have found my blog. One look at my notes on my facebook page and you will notice that there have been regular comments and ‘likes’ on my posts, the very same posts have attracted comparatively less comments on the blog itself!

One of the truly bothering signs of the overall trend has been that people are slowly getting turned away from long posts. If you are reading this line there is a probability that you are a part of the minority that feel 141 characters is one character too much. Another alarming trend has been that writers are slowly getting tuned to the conciseness of tweets… who can blame them, with a whole generation of mobile devices coming along its much easier to read/respond to a tweet than a blog post.

One of the strengths of blogging has been the lifespan of a blog post. Most tweets become irrelevant after a few minutes but a blog post’s relevance continues depending on the topic and the writer in question. Its this attribute of the blog that can help it survive this takeover from other platforms.

When blogging fever had hit its prime years ago, there was a sudden advent of blogs appearing everywhere; now with the drive changing direction this might actually be for the best. The surviver in this exodus will most probably be the genuine high quality writers and their insistence in holding on to blogging will hopefully bring back the blog to its niche best.

Personally I have always spoken better thru my blog than thru my tweets or my status messages, so I do hope the hay days of blogging arent behind us.

According to my profile page of the blog, it turns out that I had crossed my 1000th post a couple of posts back Well here are some stats from that page:
Created on 2005-05-20 10:45:17
1001 posts. 3,926 comments received, 2,954 comments posted

A special thank you to all my readers, its you who has kept me motivated to eventually see this day. Hope have enjoyed and will continue to enjoy my little space on the Internet

William Shakespeare famously once wrote “All the world’s a stage, And all the men and women merely players“… Shakespeare in his time must have also wondered about his purpose of life and during one of his epiphanies must have believed that he was closer to his purpose than ever.

But what if there is no purpose? What if life is what we truly make of it… Then what is the drive for existence? I believe the real drive for existence is the “pursuit of happiness”

When we look at life and look at the thousands of decisions we have made over our lifetime, what becomes clear is that each and every one of those decisions were made with the expectation that, that particular moment would lead to happiness.

Its easy to look at obvious decisions like going to a movie, visiting a place, meeting up with friends, but even painful choices like lying to someone or breaking a insignificant law had in its core an expectation that things would become in some way better for you. It is this pursuit that we make unconsciously, that shapes the life we have and happiness we eventually get…

What is truly amazing is that we hardly ever discuss happiness or look at ways to seek it in its purest form. Most of our lives are spent trying to indirectly find happiness. The thought that I shall do X task and it will lead to Y situation which will make me happy is so deeply embedded in our minds that we hardly ever wonder what it is to be happy.

It was during a reunion with a few of my ex-colleagues a couple of days ago that I realized that happiness involves being truly comfortable in the moment. As I sat and talked the evening away with my old friends I realized that I was very happy with myself and the moment. Despite knowing at the same moment that my team whom i closely followed had fared badly (an event that would almost always have me sporting a frown). I wondered out loud and asked a friend why it wasn’t that sad or disappointing that our team lost that evening. He simply said, “I am just happy I am here, other than that nothing else matters”.

Thats when I realized it, each one of us in this quest of happiness have become wary of what it is that will disappoint us. We try our best to avoid it but along the way we decide to gamble our happiness for an event. We hope that at the end of the event we will become a happier person and decided to throw in our valuable attention as the wager.

Each and every moment of our lives we are gambling our worries and peace of mind, all for that moment of ecstasy that we hope will last forever.

Today I stood in the middle of a field and watched the sunset… my work needed me to be present at the place at that point of time and as I watched the orange ball of fire slowly descend into the horizon, the dark rain bearing clouds moved in to take its place. The temperature dropped suddenly by a few degrees and soon there was a cool breeze blowing, I stood silently and tried my best to experience the moment that surrounded me. In that moment I was truly happy…

There is a school of philosophy that believes that “you get hurt only by the ones you truly love”. In a sense this is the very same concept of investing an expectation and being let down. One approach of happiness would be to give up investing… then you wont be let down by anyone or anything… but that would mean you should never love again.

But there is an alternative way, I have realized that we must choose to always look at the big picture. Search for things that will make you happy no matter what, maybe its reading or writing, maybe its walking in the evenings or talking to someone that inspires you, maybe its listening to your favorite music or running in the morning, maybe its dancing in the privacy of your room or talking to a baby… What ever it is figure out what it is that exhilarates you. Make that list as long and as diverse as possible… Then just make sure that you search of opportunities to do the things on that list.

Its really that simple, life will give you so many opportunities to do the things that truly make you happy. And when you get an opportunity grab it… don’t think twice…

What I have realized from life is that each and every one of us is somehow, for good or worse hardwired to seek happiness in the traditional way. We are always looking at investing our thoughts and attention at something/someone in the hope that it will make us happy, but the fact is there is already so much beauty in the world and yourself to find happiness. Considering every single decision we made was weighed on the scale of happiness, why walk away from a small treasure of happiness?