We are all hell-bent on seeking happiness, but it is so elusive that the frustrating pursuit ends up making us increasingly unhappy.
Ena, 92, has the antidote to this conundrum. Major surgery last August and a fractured shoulder this January have not hindered his daily spiritual Q&A sessions with his multinational disciples. The man whom his devoted family calls Ena is Ramesh Balsekar, the London University commerce graduate, former Mr Bombay and banker who is globally deferred to as the master of pure advaita . He is also a great teller of jokes, pulling them out of his cut-pasted and classified trove to leaven the denser points of philosophy.
My son is married to his granddaughter, and they live with him and Ema/Sharada, Ena's wife of 69 years. So we get the privilege of an elevating encounter with the 'householder sage' every Sunday when we go over for a family lunch. Last July, he handed me one of his books intriguingly titled, Pursue Happiness and Get Enlightened. Those on a higher plane may know that true bliss or ecstasy is quite different from mortal or material measures of the happiness quotient. But to the spiritually challenged, Ena had upended the conventional order. We had always believed happiness to be the coveted end-product of enlightenment, not its pre-requisite raw material.
Then a couple of weeks ago, there were reports of recent research indicating that our genes determine whether we will be the sunny-side-ups who see the doughnut, or the sods who see only the hole. Combined with the earthly edition of the Balsekar doctrine, did this mean that optimists have a better shot at nirvana than the glummies? Can karma really be checkmated by something as mundane as an individual's genetic programming of his messenger molecule, serotonin? Knowing as little of the esoterics of science as of spiritualism, this writer will not venture a conclusion. But she would like to strike a blow for being upbeat especially in the Keynesian Kaliyug of downturn.
Genes are too difficult to pin down, but conditioning certainly pitched me into the Smiley camp. My father had a two-gun armoury for the battle of life. By far, the bigger weapon was 'Make Your Own Sunshine' (MYOS), which he fired at us at every opportunity, or even without the slightest provocation. The other incidentally was 'Be Flexible; if you bend a little, you won't break'.
In earlier adult years, my conditioned response was maddening. Why did I automatically find a way to lift up myself and my spirits after every put-down instead of mustering a spirited Dylan-like, 'rage, rage against the dying of the light' and the denial of due pie-shares? Later wisdom made me submit more willingly to Dad's DIY prescription for happiness. For it meant no one can push you into the dungeons of power-play, pique or pettiness. You don't have to be a sultan of SWOT, you just subconsciously convert 'threat'.
Years ago, a 'punishment posting' became an opportunity, freeing up the time needed to research and write the longer pieces which simply weren't possible in my earlier, flashier position. It was effected just naturally, without a roll of war-drums, and, confessedly, no doffing of a cap to Dad's daily insistence on manufacturing your own sunshine. MYOS is not passive acceptance; it is active cloud-dispelling intervention.
So if you recently got the SMS which said, `Due to cost-cutting directives, the light at the end of the tunnel has been switched off', all you had to do was switch on your torch and keep at it. You may not have found nirvana, but the DIY experience would have been enlightening.