Skip to main content

The Happy are Lucky - guest post

 

Dr Joseph Thonikuzhiyil

Joseph is an old friend of mine. We got to know each other in 1987 and the friendship continued for many years. Joseph appears a number of times in my memoir, Autumn Shadows. We were colleagues in the department of English at St Edmund’s College, Shillong for five years. Luck did not favour me and I had to give up the lucrative job. Soon Delhi became my refuge and leaving Shillong turned out to be a wise decision. So did my misfortune become my luck?

Luck and fate. What do they mean? When something turns out to be good, is it luck? Otherwise, fate? In one of his relaxed evenings, Joseph wrote me a WhatsApp message which sounded poetic as well as philosophical to me. I requested him to write a guest post on the topic and he consented. Below is what he wrote.

The Author

Dr Joseph Thonikuzhiyil has over thirty-two years of teaching experience - national and international. He has had vast experience in training candidates for all types of English competitive and entrance examinations, such as NET, SET, KTET, CTET, SAT, GMAT, CAT, TOEFL and IELTS. He completed his graduate and postgraduate studies at NEHU (Central University), Shillong. He obtained his PhD in 2004 from the same university. From 1988 to 2005, he worked as an Associate Professor of English at St. Edmund's College, Shillong. Thereafter, Joseph worked as a Professor of English at London City College (Affiliated to Madona University, Michigan USA), Dubai. He had a stint of two years (2011-2013) at Higher College of Technology, the Sultanate of Oman. At present, he works as an IELTS trainer in Iritty, Kerala.

 

The Happy are Lucky

By Joseph Thonikuzhiyil

If I reverse this title to my brief write-up, The Lucky are Happy, it would invite multiple interpretations. And that is exactly what I would like this small piece of writing to do. If I fail, it is just because I am not lucky, and if I succeed, I will be happy.

I am not sure, to be honest, the depth of the courtship between luck and happiness. But I am convinced that happiness, to a large degree, is the result of a conspiracy forged by the Lady Luck who sporadically turns out to be a lady of easy virtue.

Believing that the happy are lucky would mean, in my understanding, that these rare beings who have intelligently exploited certain inherent traits of theirs. To contend that the lucky are happy would imply, mysteriously though, that they had some equally enigmatic extra-terrestrial assistance to boast of their happy condition.

Having put forward these controvertible thoughts, I would like to believe that the word LUCK is an invention of those who have lacked wisdom, like me, and many more.

The happy are lucky because they, consciously or unconsciously, have worked for it. On the other hand, advocates of The-Lucky-are-Happy forget the inscrutable force that has made them lucky.

Any intelligent thinker would be perplexed by the way life has treated him or her. And believe me, in most cases, their catastrophe is not their making. Rather, it is the result of the combined mischief of a callous universe and the helpless inhabitants of it.

The happy are lucky because they can relish it. And the lucky ought to wait to relish it.



Comments

  1. Yamini MacLeanDecember 18, 2022 at 7:01 PM

    Hari OM
    Indeed, happiness is such an elusive, personal thing; to attain it for oneself is fortune won! YAM xx

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl
47 comments
Read more

Joys of Onam and a reflection

Suppose that the whole universe were to be saved and made perfect and happy forever on just one condition: one single soul must suffer, alone, eternally. Would this be acceptable? Philosopher William James asked that in his 1891 book, The Moral Philosopher and the Moral Life . Please think about it once again and answer the question for yourself. You, as well as others, are going to live a life without a tinge of sorrow. Joyful existence. Life in Paradise. The only condition is that one person will take up all the sorrows of the universe on him-/herself and suffer – alone, eternally. What do you say? James’s answer is a firm no . “Not even a god would be justified in setting up such a scheme,” James asserted, knowing too well how the Bible justified a positive answer to his question. “It is expedient that one man should die for the people, so that the nation can be saved” [John 11:50]. Jesus was that one man in the Biblical vision of redemption. I was reading a Malayalam period...
19 comments
Read more

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...
19 comments
Read more

India in Modi-Trap

That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. Illustration by Gemini AI A friend forwarded a WhatsApp message written by K Sahadevan, Malayalam writer and social activist. The central theme is a concern for science education and research in India. The writer bemoans the fact that in India science is in a prison conjured up by Narendra Modi. The message shocked me. I hadn’t been aware of many things mentioned therein. Modi is making use of Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan’s Centre for Study and Research in Indology for his nefarious purposes projected as efforts to “preserve and promote classical Indian knowledge systems [IKS]” which include Sanskrit, Ayurveda, Jyotisha (astrology), literature, philosophy, and ancient sciences and technology. The objective is to integrate science with spirituality and cultural values. That’s like harnessing a telescope to a Vedic chant and expecting the stars to spin closer. The IKS curricula have made umpteen r...
8 comments
Read more

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...
16 comments
Read more