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. 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

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...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...