Prafulla Kumar Mohanty
Pleasure and Pain, they say, are agreeable and disagreeable chemical reactions in the body. Ok. Let me dismiss them as aberrations of the system, a manufacturing defect deliberately left unattended by the Maker. What is happiness then? A lingering sentiment where all wants, desires, aspirations, dreams are in a state of animated suspension? A happy man is ... what? Is he contented, desireless and therefore in a static state? I really do not know, for, in my childhood I read - Are you a pig satisfied or an Aristotle dissatisfied? I know I am not a pig. I am naturally dissatisfied with everything. The more I read, the more I discover my ignorance. My knowledge does not help me in fixing a blade in my Mac Fusion, I request others to do it for me, The more I see the state of the world, not only in 2020 but in all my years of silent encounters with reality I was never elated. A few scientific inventions, however, have made my senses wild in hope for happiness but I never saw or felt any static glow bringing cheer to all human faces. Happiness, I view as human happiness, not the personal happiness of a prophet or thinker or a political strategist who mesmerizes a large number of people to follow him. Private, personal frustration often makes a man devise a philosophy, a so called salvation path or an ideology which promises happiness. The people who followed Asharam or Ram Rahim or the Buddha or Shankar or any breathing creature, never lived their own lives. We follow an ideology or cult figure because we have no mind of our own to find happiness on our own. We always wait for a Messiah. We always wait for Godot.
If happiness is really a worriless, healthy, prosperous, free, well loved, sexually satisfied, well respected and honoured state in a human being, it is available only in poetic imagination, in some gem studded Orb of infinity in which a person listens to the alaaps of Tansen at dawn, the Beethoven Jupiter Symphony while watching swimming nymphs being painted by Botticelli in a moonlit night. Such things make happy reading, not happy reality. The human mind, we must remind ourselves is never happy, not meant to be happy as ideas, thoughts move in time defying logic in the mind. But the fact is that the human grain cannot tolerate reality; if it is unchanged he is bored, if it changes rapidly he gets wild. Man is intellectually radicalised against his own civilizational values and the structures of his own making.
If man ever wanted to be happy, the present times are the best in the last about one million year old history of man. Food, house and medicines are available to more than 95 % of humans, although the availability is not equitable. But hunger-death, sickness - death have come down. More farmers in India die committing suicide than due to starvation and disease. Wars of the mass destruction kind are almost gone. More people die of plane crashes and road accidents than by organised warfare. Yes, the argument will be based on Covid-19; the world has not yet found a vaccine and this coronavirus has changed the cultural patterns of society. But by the year end more than three vaccines will be available and return to the old normal may become quite possible. But what is the old normal? Eat well, work hard, earn more, drink more and think of destroying India, China or some other country. Pakistan will stake her hunger against hate for India; the LOC and borders will always be hot. China would plot against America, India and other democracies; the latest being opium trade, getting supplies from Afgan Taliban. Despite all these deprivations of the human material the present period could keep a man happy in the post- covid decades. But who wants to be a good human being and live in peace with neighbours and fellow men?
The institutions built by civilizational values like Parliamentary Democracy, Supreme Court, Civic liberties, free speech and similar ennobling institutions do not keep people away from fakery, hate and violence. One argumentative thesis by way of explanation of the present and continuing danger facing modern man has come from Samual P. Huntington's Clash of Civilizations. The western values and the values of the Muslim world are almost always in a combative stage. And this clash both kinetic and simmeringly potential has kept mankind on edge. The Muslim world refuses to accept the modern education, work culture and institutions of free expression of ideas or individualistic lifestyle. Hence anger is nursed by groups of human kind who do not wish to be content. Nothing pleases them. They wallow in anxiety, uncertainty, fear and anger.
Man creates order, harmony, balance and calls them classical values but romanticizes violence and justifies anger. In short, man enjoys polluting the earth, poisoning the air, killing other humans, hating his own breed- species and blowing up all bridges to human heart. If Cain killed his brother and raped his mother and ruined the future of God's prized creation, why blame the inheritors for their transgressive shenanigans? Man never wants peace or happiness, in fact, he hates peace. A calm evening of human togetherness picks on his nerves. He breaks the calm of the head, bowing before some God at day break. Chaodelights him, cacophony excites him anatd love makes him a rapist. He will not change come Covid come Plague. Long live Man!
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