No Problems Only Opportunities

You’ve probably heard this joke. A young man walked into his office one morning and found a beautiful young lady sitting in his chair. He called the MD and said, “Sir, I have a problem.” The MD replied, “Don’t you know our company’s motto, young man? No Problems, Only Opportunities.”

When Suchita of The Blogchatter sent me a mail with the topic of this week’s blog hop – 

- the first thing that came to my mind was the above joke.

I know many people – too many, in fact – who went through terrible problems. My own life was a series of problems in none of which was there the consolation of any beautiful woman. One essential lesson I learnt from life is that life is a series of problems. You solve one and then arises the next one. Now I have reached an age when problems are no more problems: they are life itself.

If you ask me what was the biggest problem I ever dealt with, it was my last years in Shillong. I was a lecturer in a college drawing a fat salary stipulated by the University Grants Commission. If I had continued in that job, I’d have been drawing a pension of nearly one lakh today. Instead, I became just another face in India’s billion-strong crowd—a taxpayer funding the luxuries of a select few. But perhaps that's another way of saying I found freedom from certain illusions.

Well, that’s an opportunity if you wish to look at it that way. It’s an opportunity to keep hitting the keyboard of my laptop instead of committing the cardinal sin of sloth.

I had a lot of personality disorders which some Christian missionaries in Shillong decided not to like one fine day. That was my problem. They made my life miserable. I can be as stubborn as a buffalo with anything that goes against my grain. And once missionaries decide to reform you, their grip is like chains welded shut. They know that the good shepherd should leave behind the entire fold and go in search of the lost sheep.

I chose to leave the flock altogether. I didn’t belong there. That’s how Maggie and I found ourselves sitting in a taxi that carried us to Guwahati railway station from where a train would carry us to Delhi. By sheer coincidence, the dashboard of the taxi held an inscription that read: No one can take away what is in your fortune; No one can give you what is not in your fortune. I contemplated that and became a fatalist – well, nearly.

No, that was not the opportunity that the problem in Shillong offered me. Delhi turned out to be a kind of paradise. Both of us found jobs in a residential school nestled in a vast, green campus—calm, ordered, and refreshingly free. The best period of my life was lived there on that campus. It was strangled by another set of missionaries: this time a Hindu cult called RSSB.

The last part of my professional life was in a school run by a missionary congregation in Kerala. Another opportunity, you see. This time I learnt that not all missionaries are keen on reforming you. But, of course, I had grown more mature by the time I left Delhi. More sober, more receptive to reality. As a young man, I wanted reality to fit into my notions. Delhi taught me a new way of viewing reality. That sort of learning is the real opportunity that problems bring, I guess. Even if I paid a heavy price in terms of economy, I did learn much from the five years of rigorous imprisonment that Shillong’s missionaries sentenced me to for all practical purposes.

Yes, Suchita, life is a great teacher with its endless problems. Probably, that’s the only purpose of life: to teach us certain things. Perhaps the greatest irony is that by the time life teaches us its hardest lessons – and we’re finally ready to live fully – our time is nearly up. Life is a joke that way, not only a series of problems and opportunities.

PS. Written for  #BlogchatterBlogHop