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.