Office Notes
Published by Aakarsh under Office Notes on Thursday, July 03, 2014
As I watch hundreds of people entering this office building, with boredom looming large on their faces... as if they were in the process of coming to terms with the drudgery of this life... I can't help finding a parallel to this in the faces of convicts who are taken to rocky mountains so that they can break some rocks, under the hawk eyes of jailors monitoring their every move, their every hammer-stroke... to ensure that they squeeze out all the physical and mental capacities for a definite objective unconcerned to the actual convict. And finally they are taken back to their prison cells in the evening, where they have their dinner and sleep, dreaming about the day when they would finally embrace freedom. Within the corporate highwalls, every employee seems engaged in a constant survival battle, out to ensure that some rocks are crushed, living up to the charters drawn by the establishment. And these men and women retreat into their own homes instead of prison cells, in the evening. That's some difference, although I wonder if they are really escaping any prison cell at all.
The parallel seems like a hyperbole, given that these jobs are actually the conscious choices of these people and that they wouldn't want to let go off them even in their wildest dreams, for these careers feed their needs, wants and luxuries... These machinated men and women, are needed to crank up and run the economic engines that fatten the wallets of the establishment, thereby feeding the engine in another industry... and so on...
But this whole survival mode of existence, for a good part of the day, day after day, could lead us to an obsession that can, without no exaggeration, handicap our ability to distinguish happiness from prosperity. Prosperity needs neither definition nor interpretation today.
Happiness, as I am coming to realize,... is a function of not just the wants as calculated by our burdened brains, but also of the soul, the compass of which must be calibrated everyday, consciously, by some thought... A thought unmindful of survival questions.
The parallel seems like a hyperbole, given that these jobs are actually the conscious choices of these people and that they wouldn't want to let go off them even in their wildest dreams, for these careers feed their needs, wants and luxuries... These machinated men and women, are needed to crank up and run the economic engines that fatten the wallets of the establishment, thereby feeding the engine in another industry... and so on...
But this whole survival mode of existence, for a good part of the day, day after day, could lead us to an obsession that can, without no exaggeration, handicap our ability to distinguish happiness from prosperity. Prosperity needs neither definition nor interpretation today.
Happiness, as I am coming to realize,... is a function of not just the wants as calculated by our burdened brains, but also of the soul, the compass of which must be calibrated everyday, consciously, by some thought... A thought unmindful of survival questions.
