HAPPINESS
Some people consider happiness a comparative term. A child is happy when he gets a chocolate, another is happy on receiving snacks. People feel they would be happy if they have a house of their own. The ambitions differ from person to person. A girl or a young-man may have happiness from fashionable dresses, from a picture full of sex and violence. A leader may be happy when he is elected to a prestigious post. One student may be happy securing II class while another may be sad even on having II position in the Board. All these provide us pleasure and joy not happiness.
The story goes — a cobbler sat with his box near the palacious building of a businessman. He would work hard throughout the day and would sleep at the same place during night keeping the box by his side. The businessman envied his sleep for he never had a sound sleep. He called the cobbler one day and gave him a hundred rupee note to keep for emergency. The cobbler could not sleep the whole night. He was worried about the note. The next morning he went to the businessman and returned the note saying ‘with thousands of such notes you could have never slept. Only one did not allow me to sleep one night. I am happy I haven’t such wealth’. The businessman had all the pleasures and joys derived from luxurious things, but had no happiness.
Happiness does not come from worldly and material gains. It is not procured through our physical senses what we call Tanchendriyas’. Even a sensual poet like Shelley says,
To seek for happiness — alas, the day!
ye find not in luxury nor in gold,
Nor in the fame, nor in the envied sway
It is an inner acquisition. It does not come from the hectic race for material gains but from contentment. Alexander Pope wrote two and a half centuries back
Happy the man, whose wish and care,
A few paternal acres bound,
Content to breathe his native air, In his own ground.
The contention of Pope stands true even today.