From IIM Ahmedabad To Happiness

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

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FROM IIM-AHMEDABAD TO HAPPINESS
after such a lot of worry and trouble, and is generally productive of so much suffering that it is no exaggeration to say that it is born in pain and ends in tears.
A question - certainly a legitimate one - that is often asked is: why should one ponder over such things as knowledge, wisdom, joy and happiness? In other words, why not go on living as usual in this world, enjoying its pleasures, rather than to renounce them? We must answer this question.
We agree that all straining and striving which is going on in this world is the outcome of a thirst for happiness. Some people spend their whole lives in thus trying object after object in a vain search for happiness and, ultimately, left without having any tangible aim in life, drift like wrecks and die of aimlessness. That is why it is of utmost importance that we must know, as thinking beings, what we are aiming at before we can expect to get it. A mere tickling of the senses, we have seen, provides us with a counterfeit coin of pleasure and pain, both of which are transient in nature, and end in suffering and pain. Incapable of understanding the true principles of life, we spend our working life in the pursuit of sensual pleasures with their associated worries and flurries, and subsequent life, till death, in misery.
A clear understanding of the larger objectives in life that are worth pursuing is the only way that could give us the ability to distinguish between the base imitation and the genuine article. But this process must start when there is still time left, before a feeling of world-weariness and dissatisfaction takes us over. At that late stage, we are generally incapable of understanding the true principles of life and find it extremely difficult to adapt ourselves to the life of physical and moral severity which is necessary to attain to our higher goals in life. We then turn to praying and worshipping in an unintelligible and vague manner, devoid of joy
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