LIFE, HOPE AND A LITTLE SUGAR

Mostly in life things don’t go the way we want them to be. Sometimes life takes such unexpected turns that you are not able to make sense of it. With your faith shaken and your trust broken it’s extremely difficult to let go. Let go of the expectations you had, let go of the hopes, which were dashed. So, what do you do?

People expect you to brush everything aside and move on with your head held high and pretty smile perpetually sitting on your lips. You try. You try really hard for your loved ones, you try to fake it, and you try to tell the world that everything is hunky dory while it is not! Inside you are just tearing apart. You just want to run away, run away to the mysterious and mystifying world of the unknown.

As I look out of my office window, I see people. Someone is rushing to the office, meeting deadlines, somebody is fetching kids from school, women shopping, and teenagers at the tea stall. Right at this moment, someone could be looking after ailing parents, or going to college, or rushing to hospital to meet an injured friend or a relative. Somebody has just died while just around the corner in that hospital a baby is born.

Someone wants to dance while another is learning to walk. Someone just bought a Mercedes while there is man trying to manage a day’s meal. Somebody is buying a mansion today while there is someone else who is unable to pay even a small house rent, someone has just lost a job, and someone got a heavy appraisal. Somebody has floated a new company while another one is going for a holiday abroad; someone has just won a ticket for election while someone has just gone bankrupt. A student has topped in his exams while another one has failed miserably. Somebody has just found a soul mate while someone has just lost one. It’s a mad mad rush again for the unknown and the unseen mysteries which life keeps unfolding time and again, for all of us, in one way or the other.

What holds all these people together is a word called HOPE. Parents pin hope on the kids and vice versa. Whether the day has been good, bad, ugly, shocking, surprising, inspiring or worrying, HOPE gives all of us a reason to survive. For some,this hope maybe in the form of a God. A God who some know as an impersonal life-force to a benevolent, personal, almighty Creator. He has different names for all of us like, “Ram, Zeus, Jupiter, Brahma, Allah, Vishnu, Odin, Ashur, Izanagi, Viracocha, Ahura Mazda and also the Great Spirit to name just a few.

For some HOPE is the faith they have in name of Sai or Guru Nanak or Khwaja Moinuddin or Nizammuddin Auliya. For others it may also come from Osho or Deepak Chopra or at times even Oprah Winfrey. Some travel long distances to find their God, while for some He is right there, inside their heart. HOPE leads to God and it also leads to fasts, mannats, piercing, hurting one self with knives, hefty donations, shaving off heads, langars, bali, witchcraft, human sacrifices, abstinence of weird sorts. This is being done all across the world with a HOPE to please God, again with a HOPE to make LIFE a little better.

At the end of a super hectic day, with all these life stories floating in front of me, I can’t help but wonder, if it is all worth it?

I have no answers to this one. The best I can do is to go and nibble that hidden chocolate of mine, with a HOPE to make me feel better.

And believe me it does, ALWAYS.