Socrates tried to answer the question, ‘How to live?’ Kierkegaard attempted it, too.
Posing the same question to the average Indian, one can expect such an answer: get educated, find a decent job, save money, get married, procreate, save more money, build house, ensure safe retirement and die. Of course, some indulgence in entertainment now and then, or daily, is assumed. Anybody who strays from this trodden path is dismissed as a lunatic or genius.
Do not the majority in different strata of society, the rich, the middle class, the aspiring class and the poor, take this route in life? They are like copies of a painting. One is a copy on paper, the other is a copy on cloth, another a copy on wood, yet another a copy on a rag. But they’re all copies.
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I believe that despite the standard life-route the average Indian takes, each educated Indian must individually answer this question and share it with concerned people. This question is best answered just before one gets married. And one must share the answer with one’s potential partner and seek his or her answer as well.
I believe that one’s stand on life’s most important matters — money, entertainment, sex, food and drink, upbringing of children, sickness expenses, caring for elders — must be outlined properly.
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The sharing must be extended to one’s professional career and other spheres as well and is best done on occasion. Certain things are okay with me, certain others are not. And one must strive to live within this framework. Why accept any framework set years ago?
In my former job as a teacher I had decided not to give private tuitions. I soon became a nuisance to others and even to myself.
Living ethically and morally has never been easy, has it? I set the goalposts by the accepted standards and wouldn’t budge except for changing their colour, size, net and other things permissible.
Not so with others who went on to become the most useful and powerful in the institution. Either they had no goalposts at all or they kept shifting the goalposts.
But the most curious of all was the captain who was also the goalkeeper. He not only kept changing the colour of the posts but the net, the size of the poles (sometimes each section being a different size) and their position and type of ball but also his position. At one time he’d climb and sit right in the middle of the horizontal section, or crawl along the net, or chat with someone in the stands, or leave his boundary and run into the field and become half back, centre forward, full back, umpire, referee and commentator. Sometimes he’d be kissing one of his many girlfriends in the stands.
How could this be allowed, one might ask? Because he was not only the host, the owner of the stadium but also the sponsor of the trophy! Get out of the game if you didn’t like his behaviour! He’d change the playing positions. Is it hard to guess who won each time his team played? Even if his team didn’t win, he did.
Many people think people with no goalposts are to be dismissed from civil society as irresponsible. Few welcome and retain those who refuse to change goalposts. But the most dangerous are those who keep shifting goalposts. These are, alas, projected as those who know how to live.
Any young person who sincerely seeks to know the answer to this question must be appreciated, not mocked. For on their shoulders rest the future of not only society but the human race itself.
mjx143@gmail.com