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

Relatives and Antidepressants

One of the scenes that remain indelibly etched in my memory is from a novel of Malayalam writer O V Vijayan. Father and little son are on a walk. Father tells son, “Walk carefully, son, otherwise you may fall down.” Son: “What will happen if I fall?” Father: "Relatives will laugh.” I seldom feel comfortable with my relatives. In fact, I don’t feel comfortable in any society, but relatives make it more uneasy. The reason, as I’ve understood, is that your relatives are the last people to see any goodness in you. On the other hand, they are the first ones to discover all your faults. Whenever certain relatives visit, my knees buckle and the blood pressure shoots up. I behave quite awkwardly. They often describe my behaviour as arising from my ego, which used to be a oversized in yesteryear. I had a few such visitors the other day. The problem was particularly compounded by their informing me that they would be arriving by about 3.30 pm and actually reaching at about 7.30 pm. ...
16 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

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

Mother Mary Comes to Me

Book Review In one of the first pages of this book, the author cautions us to “read this book as you would a novel.” No one can remember the events of their lives accurately. Roy says that “most of us are a living, breathing soup of memory and imagination … and we may not be the best arbiters of which is which.” What you remember may not be what happened exactly. As we get on with the painful process called life, we keep rewriting our own narratives. The book does read like a novel. Not because Roy has fictionalised her and her mother’s lives. The characters of these two women are extremely complex, that’s why. Then there is Roy’s style which transmutes everything including anger and despair into lyrical poetry. There’s a lot of pain and sadness in this book. The way Roy narrates all that makes it quite a classic in the genre of memoirs. The book is not so much about Roy’s mother Mary as about that mother’s impact on the daughter’s very being. Arundhati was born in the undivided ...
14 comments
Read more