A sudden loud sound broke
Brinda’s sleep. The window beside her bed banged against the pane due to a gust
of wind. She sat up to close the window, but the sky wouldn’t let her. It was a
typical August morning, cloudy and relentlessly raining. For a moment, she felt
how lucky the clouds were; they show their sorrow whenever they feel heavy. We
humans are deprived of this liberty, as we need a ‘suitable’ time for
everything, to cry, to live a little, even to say, “I can’t take it anymore.”
The chilling wind made Brinda shiver, and she rubbed her palms to warm up a
little. As her thumb brushed over her wrists, a thought crossed her mind, “What
if I slit it? What if I put a stop to everything? What if life lies in death
itself? Then there will be no tomorrow, there will be no deadlines!” She didn’t
realise that tears had carved a path down her cheeks in the meantime. Her
alarm, for the first time, gave a wake-up call to an awakened Brinda, maybe to
a Brinda too tired to live anymore.
The dictionary describes
‘success’ as the accomplishment of an aim or purpose. Then what’s actually
making it an endless chase? Is it a lack of purpose or a flawed sense of
accomplishment that society has been building for ages? This very dilemma is
where aspirants find themselves in a juggernaut. It’s not the lack of purpose,
but the lack of clarity about how much achievement is enough, that plays the
pivotal role. It’s undeniably true that life is random, and this randomness
applies to both success and failure beyond a point where hard work no longer
has its reach.
We indeed need to keep in
mind that, ironically, hard work is the easiest way to open the door to
success. However, the flaw of prioritising ‘monetary return’ as the most
important yardstick for measuring success has its own set of consequences.
Judgment of a person's monetary worth involves a sense of comparativeness among
individuals, overlooking their journey, circumstances, and the entire spectrum
of life that ‘individuality’ encompasses. This, in a way, makes the very path
of judging an incomparably larger-than-life concept very myopic.
The yardstick for judging
success should be the wisdom and expertise one has gathered over time. Setting
tangible yardsticks for an intangible acumen is a loophole in itself, where
lives are getting breathlessly stuck. Requisite changes in policy and system
are needed in this pursuit, but a change in thought is a prerequisite,
otherwise, success will stay confined to the hands of quantitative
enumerations, where the fineness of life ceases to exist, and lives end up
chasing an illusion that seems to be ‘success’, making the journey of hard work
destined to a mirage that is mercilessly unattainable.
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