So I just read this immensely impressive novel by Jeffrey Archer called ‘Paths of Glory’. Impressive because it has left me with some questions that quite challenge my theory about life.

In my mind I always had a broad classification of people into two categories – those who strive for success and those who run after happiness. And this little definition of success which I’m going to interpret now might just look like a huge one. Success can be only seen when you reach the pinnacle of glory. It is success only when you are the greatest in a particular field. Like, when you are playing cricket, you have to be Sachin Tendulkar. That’s success.  Know what I’m saying? I mean see, when you look at someone like say, Rohit Sharma, you call him a successful cricketer because he has reached this far. But in his mind, he will always feel that he will achieve real success only when he surpasses Tendulkar. And if he disagreed to that, he will be lying to himself. Let’s make it a bit simpler for you, but before going any further I’m sorry if I offended any Rohit-fan, that wasn’t the point. So back to where we were, let me make it simpler for you. Let’s take your own example, when you have a class test and you score 19/20 and when that is the highest score in the class, everyone praises you. You are called ‘successful’. And at that moment there is something else on your mind. Yes, you are of course happy with the 19, but you keep wondering why couldn’t you reach that 20. You regret not getting there. And that’s what I’m saying. 20 is the pinnacle I’m talking about. That’s what I define success as. And when I classify people into these two categories I have observed that those who fall under ‘successful’ have always been brutally partial towards their happiness. The success I’m talking about cannot be achieved without pushing aside happiness and attachments. These people can seek happiness only when they reach their 20-mark because that’s what they always look at all the time. The pinnacle. And they do seek it there. When these people reach their 20-mark they feel happy. Now when they have finally some time to think about other things in life like a family and a stabilized way of living, they see that they have left these things far behind in their quest to seek the top position. They see that success has costed them everything else that life otherwise offers.

Then there is this another category which consists of people who pursue happiness because they believe it is everything. Now these people feel successful even when they really aren’t. They don’t even think of getting that 20 on their sheet and they are content even with a 6 or an 8. These people stop being ambitious at a point and look around. Of course they still have their family with them. And these very people are those who look up with awe and respect at the ones who stand at the pinnacle in pride. Now after all this explanation, I would proudly say that I am and always have been wanting to go and fit in the first list. Happiness has always looked secondary to me. 20 is what I think about. And that is what I always thought about regardless of all the other things in life until I put down this book.

Now to talk about the book, Paths of Glory is an outstanding story of a man from the first list. Set in the early 1900s, this story is about a mountaineer who dreams of the pinnacle, who wants to stand at the roof of the world, the Everest. And as this man reaches closer to his destiny, he realises how much he loves his wife and how much had he put at stake while climbing this dangerous and undiscovered summit of the mountain. Needless to say, when he just realises that he wants to spend the rest of his life with his wife from now on and not with the mountains, he reaches the summit of the Everest and while climbing down, he dies a cold death.

The story is simple without any complications but it is enough to stir an ambitious man. Every man in the world wants one woman whom he can love and spend all his life with, and I’m no different. And there is the point. What confuses me is this – is the stride towards destiny more important that a woman who will raise a family with you? Many a times I still get a ‘yes’ as the answer. Destiny is the inside call, but these days I also get a silence as the answer sometimes. And that is where it makes men weak. A woman will shackle you with her love and never let you go far away beyond her reach. And the tragedy is that a man can survive without success but he needs love. Know that saying about successful people, ‘behind every successful man there is a woman’? I guess it should be corrected to ‘behind every successful man there is a woman whom he left behind.’

I had read somewhere that if you truly love two women at the same time, one of them will kill you someday. I always thought it was funny, but if this other woman is going to be your destiny, I think the sentence makes complete sense. I have come to believe that life is nothing but making a choice between these two women. And the best part is, any choice you make is going to make you feel that you chose the wrong one. All the best mate. 😉

(This is something I wrote during my exams in the last month.)

Sitting by my study table, I’m writing this something which would turn into anything by the time I finish it. This something-anything is a funny process, you begin thinking about the second law of thermodynamics but you don’t know if it would end in a conventional manner.

Yeah I was thinking about the second law of thermodynamics a while ago. I was wrestling with the theory and wondering if it’s really possible to construct one perpetual motion machine. It’s a good exercise for the mind. But it’s the worst thing you can do when you have a thermal engineering examination just eight hours away. And I have just worsened my chances of getting a 40 on my result sheet the moment I began writing this. I’m not drunk, nor have I done anything else that would make me high, and yet I feel really nice. It’s strange to have that kind of ‘nice’ feeling at 2 am in the morning.

And since I’m in good spirits, I decided to waste my time in a progressive way. I began with a little thought experiment. The aim was to find out why am I feeling nice at such an odd hour. So the first thing was listing all the possibilities which would make an engineering student having an exam in eight hours feel ‘nice’. The very first thing on this answers list can be nothing else but ‘knowing that I’m prepared for the exam and can answer any question’. This possibility gets erased without any doubts. Other things that can come up as an answer are getting laid, getting high, receiving a romantic message from someone special,  or feeling nothing at all. Now since only the last two possibilities seemed practically possible at this hour, I checked my phone first. No messages. That leads to the conclusion that I’m feeling nothing at all.Then I began pondering over this feeling of feeling nothing at all. And it is very interesting to know that it is not confined to this moment, it is a wider concept. Okay, let me explain.

This feeling (what an antithesis!) came up in my mind right at the moment when I shut down this huge book of thermal engineering. Just a few hours before the exam I decided that I did not want to study the subject in a conventional manner and so I began wrestling with the great theories of Kelvin, Planck and Clausius. Then I realized that I was wasting my time. But would reading the equations have made any difference in my life? Getting a 40 in this semester, doing the same for the rest of the semesters and getting a job after graduation is the only reason why I was trying to understand the whole subject. And like one rotten apple can spoil the whole basket, my careless attitude towards the subject made me careless about the whole engineering education and the job that I would get after that. And I was left with nothing to worry (for the moment of course).

And while this nothingness got spread over my mind, it made me realise that all these things in their true forms were mere nothings. Out of 4 lakh students who study engineering and get a BE degree every year in this nation, how many would remember college as a a place where they learned Whitworth Quick Return mechanism or a Rankine Cycle? And how many of them would want to apply these things in real life to find the happiness which every human runs after? The answer to these questions would be, none. And that’s why these things are what I term as ‘nothings’. And in fact, everything that cannot make you happy is a nothing. So now when there are only 7 hours left for my exam to begin, I realised one of the most important fundamental truths: nothingness is relative. And yet, when I say that everything that cannot make you happy is a nothing, I do not intend to say that you should concentrate only on alcohol, sex and loud music. Happiness is running after your passions. Don’t inject the Superman Syndrome inside you because it’s really not necessary. But at the same time care should be taken that you keep doing these worthless nothings to a certain extent, because if we always keep doing what makes us happy, the law of marginal utility will kill the joy. So the whole game of seeking happiness is to be played on a line of things that make you happy and the rest. One wrong step can knock you miles away from the right place.

The funniest and probably the most antithetical thing about this article is, even though I have realised what I’m doing is a ‘nothing’ and is pretty much worthless, I’m going to do the same exact thing tomorrow and five semesters after that. Because one blog article can sure make us realise that what we are doing is not what we should be doing, but it cannot change the whole system on which things work. Not in 7 hours at least.

But it also doesn’t mean that you’ll have to die doing odd nothings all your life. There will come a point when you will have the full authority to push it aside and begin doing what makes you happy. Till then, just keep pushing.

Enough said already. I should get some sleep before facing the music tomorrow. And guess what? I’m still feeling ‘nice’. 😉