Happiness is an experience and all of us have experienced this state a number of times in our life. All our actions, consciously or unconsciously are motivated towards attaining this state. Today in this fast-moving world, after completing the race of life or even in midway, let us ask ourselves, have we attained this state? Have we attained what we wanted to achieve or attain or what we thought we will achieve in the end? Most of us will find the answer in negative. In fact, following a course of mundane activities of life, in pursuit of our routine goals, we tend to forget the bliss of the journey, coolness of the wind, feel of human warmth and end-up in a life of vacuum and purposelessness.

Most of the people like me, ask a very basic question, Majid, we have got everything in our life, we have all physical comforts with us. We have a batter of servants in our home; we have visited the best tourist destinations of the world. There is nothing in this world which is beyond us but still we feel we have nothing. We find emptiness in our mind, we miss the bliss inside. We have become victims of deep dissatisfaction. In fact, we feel more thet we miss the pleasure and we don’t know what gives us pain from inside. But as the time passes, the pain becomes intolerable. And on the way, we have also lost the capacity to tolerate pain, and the journey turns even more painful.

There are many obvious reasons of our unhappiness. Hoarding tendency is an important cause of our unhappiness. Hoarding has become a way of our life. In fact, we Kashmiris have a great hoarding tendency. We want to secure not only our children but grand children also. For a long spell of period of history, we have been a deprived state. We have been ruled and misruled by many alien communities. Thus, we have become victims of mental poverty. We have developed hunger genes in our cells. Some of us have been overpowered by cool mentality. In the past, we have been the victims of frequent famines and epidemics and they have left a deep imprint on our psyche and behavior. Every possible small community in this world had the pleasure of ruling us. We teach the world the path of renunciation, but inside we have become hoarders. We try to grab whatever comes in our way.

It is an irony that happiness keeps on eluding the disciples and the Gurus. The students and the teachers, the patients and the doctors, professionals and businessmen, employees and the employers, we have got the big house and big cars but at home, children have become demanding and aggressive. Luxuries have made us intolerant. Comforts have sown seeds of unhappiness and made life uncomfortable

Happiness comes from a contended mind. Fluffiness of a desire creates another desire. The more you try to fulfill, more desirous you become. Desires create a state of restlessness. They create ripples in the reservoir of human mind. So more you try to fulfill them, more restlessness you experience. That is why family disputes, separations, divorces are so common in the Western world. Everyone has become demanding. All of us are egoistic and thus highly intolerant. Have the advanced nations been able to reduce their crime rate? Rather crime and prosperity always go together. In U.S.A., a school child shoots down more than a dozen children. It is a symptom of a restlessness at home or social anarchy. Homes have lost their old traditional essence. We lose homes, we lose simplicity. We lose relations, we lose friends, and we lose values. We lose ourselves and then we seek happiness.

(Author is a Radiodiagnosis student at GMC, Anantnag)