On Being Right vs Being Happy

Tonight I complete the second week of my summer sojourn at Trivandrum.  Thanks to a quick trip that I had to make to Bangalore it did not quite turn out to be what I would have liked it to be.  But a day trip I made to the South to a hamlet by the name Derisanamcope, near Nagercoil, more than made up for the painful dash to Bangalore.

The good thing about these trips is that they give me reasons and time to think of the more basic questions of life.  One such question is the topic of this post.  The title does sound presumptuous and somewhat like what a colleague of mine seemed to think about the title of the paper Law and Finance:  Rather pompous.  But then what I have to say is fundamentally about that trade off and hence the unduly profound title.

The trigger for this post occurred as I waited last night at the bus stand in slushy Madiwala amidst all that squalor that passengers on Bangalore’s private buses are mandatorily exposed to.  I asked myself what was it that made me cancel a plane ticket for Monday and instead travel on an overnight bus – an experience that I dread and abhor. 

I realized that it was simply that I felt that it was the right thing to do, given that my wife and sons were in Trivandrum.  I went on to explain to another friend that at the least I felt that I could not be terribly wrong in making that choice even at the expense of that painful bus ride and leaving some unfinished official business behind at Bangalore.

That in essence seems to explain most things I have done all my life for these past fifty five years.  Or perhaps forty five year odd years, from around the time I turned ten and from when I began to be conscious of the motives for my actions. 

You could well wonder what is it that makes my approach so distinct.  Well here is the point of distinction.  I understand that most of us humans choose courses of action that give us happiness.  At least the normal ones do.  We do need to allow for the possibility that there are the non-normal ones like the masochists and so on.  But they are not within the purview of what I have to say here.

That raises a more tricky question:  What is happiness?  Like a good economist defining utility or rationality I side step that question simply by stating that happiness is what the individual thinks leaves him or her feeling happy.

So people go on holidays, celebrate festivals, watch movies, have a meal with members of their immediate family, re-unite with more distant ones or friends occasionally, have a drink, possibly even get sloshed or cheat on a spouse to be with someone else that they like, or hop from one temple to another, all because it leaves them feeling happy.  I have purposely introduced a spread of activities, including some that might be repugnant to our sense of morality,because all of these activities are a pursuit of happiness, if you leave aside the moral propriety of such pursuit.

Now my situation is that as far as I can recall I have done very few things in such pursuit of happiness. To pick on an extreme, as an adolescent I indulged in some relatively harmless but forbidden explorations that teenagers breaking into puberty could be expected to.  Such adventures are normally associated with a high sense of excitement and anticipation of knowing or experiencing some titillation for the first time in one’s life.  The excitement partly comes from the sheer act of doing something proscribed as HG Wells so perceptively explains in his essay on Candour.

In my case I recall having engaged in those adventures simply because I felt that I had reached that age when it had to be done.  And if I missed it I would never be able to do it again because I would never be seventeen again in this life!  So I cannot recall any honest excitement as I went through the motions of procuring those forbidden books, hiding them from my family and devouring the salacious stories, let alone feel joy or happiness.

As I grow older I now spend considerable time in prayer and the daily rituals that I am expected to as a Brahmin.  All the spiritual gurus that I have visited or whose teachings I have read tell me that the thought of the Lord is the only source of enduring joy or bliss to us humans. 

Frankly I do all these religious and spiritual things because I am kind of convinced that it is the right thing to do for any human being.  As I mention in my previous post I also do that for beseeching the Lord for a host of favours every day.   I do not experience the sense of happiness that I see in my mother in law or that I have seen in my late mother when they listened to the stories from the Bhagavatam or Ramayana.  Not to mention the rapture of the kind that Mirabai, Tulasidas, Purandaradasa or Tukaram or any of those beacons of the Bhakti movement are said to have experienced that they even lost their body consciousness.  

Now that is all fine.  The trouble is that I could say pretty much the same thing for even the time I spend with my Dad or my wife and children.  It is true that I do occasionally have a genuine laugh when my sons or my wife say or do something that lightens up my mood.  I do feel deeply touched when they or my other relatives or my friends engage in an act of selflessness to help me, as they often do. 

But then I seem to spend time with them or be around them or do things with / for them because I feel it is the right thing to do.  So if I were to, for example, have to trade off between being at home for Diwali or being on an essential official commitment I would easily go with the latter without any pang about not being at home for Diwali because the right thing to do would be to be at that time was to be away at work.  Or, if I did elect to do the opposite it was because I felt that it was the right thing to do on that occasion and not because of the joy of participating in the festivity with my family.  As I did for example last May when I was on a plane to Boston on the twenty-fifth anniversary of my wedding, having packed my family off to Trivandrum.  

You could well say that it is how most of us would behave in the similar situations.  The difference I guess would be that if you did miss Diwali you would feel bad.  Or if you did manage to stay back you would feel happy to have been able to do so.  Unlike me who would feel neither.

At the risk of putting too fine a point and bordering on sacrilege I feel that sense of doing what is right would perhaps explain my decision to get married, to have progeny, to decide not to go abroad to work so that I could be with my parents and so on.  That would again explain the two occasions I came close to what felt like being in love before I got married.  On one of those two occasions I realized that if the party of the other part had been a botanist instead of being a student of literature I would not have been as fascinated, and so it was not the person that I was drawn to as much as her linguistic talent!

What about my own achievements in life?  Don’t they make me happy or elated?

Well, somewhere in my childhood I seem to have lost the ability to be happy.  I distinctly recall reading when I was in Class Six a collection of biographies that had in it the stories of CV Raman and Alexander the Great.  As I reflected on their lives I resolved that the only thing worth celebrating in life was achieving something as eternal as what these men had accomplished.  Anything less would be mere milestones to mark the journey to that destination. 

Ever since then nearly nothing that I accomplished has been a source of joy or happiness to me: Be it the rank I scored in my matriculation, the prizes I won in school-day competitions, my making it to IIMB, the few successes I had in my corporate life and so on, or even the house that I bought by God’s Grace before I retire.

For most people these would all be sources of satisfaction, if not joy.  Whereas in a somewhat perverse manner I seem to measure my life in terms of the things that I did not get to, such as my missing the civil services, not once but thrice, thanks to what I consider a conspiracy of circumstances, my missing the first rank by a whisker in the state in my matriculation, my not making it to the top dog position at ICICI or my lackluster life now as an academic starting with my inability to pursue a respectable North American PhD.

As I write this four page account of the existence of G. Sabarinathan, S/O R. Ganapathisubramani, b circa Oct 1959, I am reminded of that childhood poem about Solomon Grundy.  I often hark back upon that sobering remark M J Akbar made some years ago at a foundation day speech at IIMB: If the whole generations of post independence India found a mention even as a footnote in the annals of human history we would all have achieved a lot!  (Although I found his India:  A Siege Within and the TinderBox: The Past and Future of Pakistan not profound, I found this remark reflected a deep sense of history in the man.)

As you read this some of you are bound to ask if I am not looking at my own life through a dark glass?Could I reasonably argue that I have never done anything that made me feel happy in the commonly understood sense of that emotion? 

I certainly have made many choices that have left me feeling happy.  But the point I am trying to make is that I seem to be guided more often by a sense of duty and correctness than more normal people are.  By that I do not mean to suggest that normal people end up doing wrong things in the name of happiness.  I guess you get the picture, in spite of tying myself up in knots in explaining this, right?

You might also ask how do I account for the psychic income that is often supposed to motivate people to do the correct things?  That is a fair point too.  Occasionally one’s choice is driven by the desire to see the smile on the face of a family member or a friend.  But then quite often that is a merely collateral outcome in my decision calculus.

I have wondered if all that inability to derive joy out of being with family does not make me an unfeeling, uncaring, insensitive brute.  I sense that the truth perhaps is that I possibly am one.  I seem to have spent all these years just trying to make sure that I do what is right more than what makes me happy.  And that is precisely what makes me write this piece: The hope that I am doing the right thing in owning it all up, in laying bare the choices I made in my life.

Nanni….Namaskaaram..