From IIM Ahmedabad To Happiness

Author(s): Vijay K Jain
Publisher: Vikalp Printers

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FROM IIM-AHMEDABAD TO HAPPINESS
why postpone your enjoyment? Why don't you sit down here, in this Natural Garden, on the banks of this beautiful mountain stream, and enjoy the company of your real blood relations - free air, silvery light, playful water, and green earth - relations of which your blood is really formed? Hide-bound in caste are the civilized nations. They separate themselves from fellow-beings and exile themselves from free open nature and fresh, fragrant natural life into closed drawingrooms - dens and dungeons. They banish themselves from the wide world, excommunicate themselves from all creation, ostracize themselves from plant and animals. By arrogating to themselves the airs of superiority, prestige, respectability, honour, they cut themselves into isolated stagnation. Have mercy, my friends, have mercy on yourselves. The wealth swept out of the possession of the more needy and added to your property by organized craft will enable you simply to have sickening dinners of hotels and taverns, and furnish you with pallid countenances and conventional looks, will imprison you in boxes called rooms, choked with the stink of artificiality, will keep you all the time in the restlessness of mind excited by all sorts of unnatural stimulants, physical and mental. Why all such fuss for mere self-delusion? In the name of such supposed pleasure lose not your hold on the real joy. No need of beating about the bush; come, enjoy the Now and Here. Come, lie with me on the grass."
Joy, or happiness, has the element of freedom in it. It is a state of gladness or exultation, and indicates exhilaration of spirits.
A school-boy who hears the news of his success in the annual examination feels joy at the news. The boy feels joyous because something lasting has been achieved, for he is assured that he shall not have to appear for that particular examination in the future. Joy, thus, is a state of exhilaration which is manifested in consequence of some lasting and permanent good, i.e., by removal of some fetters of bondage. The idea of pleasure connot here keep pace, in any sense, with that of joy. While true joy is the
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