Perspective

The day I read this article was a day of deep brooding for me. This is a life I or people around me can never even understand - not being able to feed your cattle, not having water for yourself, not having food for your family, not being able to work and earn, losing your land and crops, and in the end having to give up your life. All this is beyond our comprehension - for the 10% middle class in India who lead a "relatively" comfortable life.

This article is not about the story of this farmer (and of so many farmers and other poor people of my country). There is nothing I can say about him. Its sad. Its deplorable that such events happen almost everyday in India. And I don’t know what the governments have done in the last 68 years to change this. None of them have focussed on our villages enough and therefore we are where we are.

But my article is not about that. It is about what happened that day after I read this article and how it has changed my perspective on my own life. I was on a very difficult project that time and a colleague of mine was complaining the whole day about how his life is so tough. I told him it isn’t.

I told him about this article, how our problems are so small, and not as difficult to solve as compared to what happens to people in other parts of the world. Our boss isn’t happy with our work and so we need to work hard and late - this is the kind of issue about which we complain all day. Where does it stand against a person struggling to find food to keep his grandchild alive, a person trying to find water to help his family survive? The answer is, nowhere.

I am not saying our problems should not be important to us. But we all need to get a perspective on life and feel lucky to have such easier and mundane issues in life to deal with, than life and death questions. We need to start complaining less and feeling better about our lives. The article above is just one such example. There are 100s more we have all read about, to make us realise how our life is easier.

So from that day, I have started complaining a lot less about work, problems and all the issues we face. They are nothing in front of problems a lot others face! And I think it has made me a lot more happier and satisfied about my life:).