Every man is a confused living being

Yes. Every man is a confused soul; he is grappled by one confusion after another. And it goes on till he is in death bed. The true meaning of Life still remains a mirage, confused, away from truth. But what is truth…


By Tridiv Sinha, New Delhi

When a child gets his senses, he takes a first step towards fulfilling his destiny – ‘Filling his parent’s life with worries’. He starts complaining about the untidy clothes he’s made to wear, which are spoiled by him. He excretes into his clothes and starts crying, complaining about the dress or clothes. He is not satisfied with the healthy and hygienic food provided to him and goes on to chew or taste anything that is prohibited for his own good. He plays with soil and prefers to stay on it.

A bit older and he starts to question about everything – what, why, how. Parents do like their kid being curious, but this also creates a great problem whether to tell the truth in everything or no. The parents create some imaginary monsters and heroes in the kids mind to frighten him and to control his unwanted activities. This solves the problem for the time being but creates a greater pit from which the child might never come out. One can not explain the exact reasons behind everything to a child, but creating imaginary stories confuses the child in his growing years. Sometimes, he finds everything which is told to be false and his beliefs shattered by the reality of life.

A friend is an important part of one’s life. I haven’t used the term good friends, because a friend is always good for you whereas the others are not worth your friendship. Teenagers sometimes make the mistake of choosing friends and pay the price dearly. Once again, he can not decide what is right and what is wrong. The person who is blessed with friends, no matter how few, is one lucky guy and a rich person.

One of the critical periods in a man’s life is the adolescence. His career and his values and perceptions build up at this point. He starts losing his faith in honesty and goodness due to practical exposure to the world.

The kid goes to school and is tortured by bullies or acts as a bully. The suffered weak kid who is called nerd or geek by others can not figure out why or how he deserved such a treatment from the bullies. A strong feeling of vengeance builds up inside him which leads to the development of the negative characters of that person. As far as the bully is concerned, he might enjoy the moments but later realizes the injustice to the weak kids he tortured. He might regret his actions at later stages of time when his own kid suffers bullies in school.

When you ask a kid about his future ambitions, he might come up with the answer like Doctor or Engineer. This is a prejudice created in their minds by parents. No child wants to become a teacher or a journalist, because they are not highly appreciated by their parents due to lack of huge money. The child grows on believing that he will be a doctor or engineer someday, his dreams are shattered when he realizes that it takes a lot to become one. The bottom-line is that parents are responsible by imposing their dreams on their kids.

When a student completes his 10th exams, he is admitted into the stream he fits in rather than the one he likes to pursue. In case of a poor student he has no option as to which stream to follow, but a brighter student have many. By brighter student in normal terms, we mean the one with higher percentage. Even if the student scores higher marks in humanities group than in science stream, his parents would prefer him to choose science as it is more illustrious one. This happens in majority of cases, if not in all the cases. The student keeps wondering why his parents choose the subjects which he didn’t liked much.

This period also brings another golden time with it – Romance. Some follow the beautiful ones, some the intellectual ones and others follow their closest friends of opposite sex. Romance at such an early period is induced by the influence of media of all types. Majority of these relationships fail and the girls or boys keep wondering what went wrong with them.

Even after people get matured, they have confusions in choosing their partners. The confusion being whether to choose the one you like most or the one who cares you the most. There’s a quote I heard recently which refers to this dilemma – “Don’t marry a person you can live with, marry a person you can’t live without”. One can use the same in the above confusion – don’t marry the person you like, marry one who likes you. Here is confusion. If you marry the one who cares about you but you do not reciprocate the same feelings, will you be happy? The opposite may be applicable to the other situation.

At middle stages of life, a person gathers wealth and fortune for his children. He may use some unfair means to gain wealth which he thinks is for the best of his family, his future generations to come. There is shortsightedness in his vision of securing a good future. He might have given a good boost for his next generation, but the later generations will have to suffer for his deeds. His actions as a corrupt person may affect a few people, which in turn become potential corrupt persons. The chain might go exponentially, which is what happening these days. Due to a few corrupt persons long way back, today’s world is filled with corrupt people where no one can trust each other. We are making it worse by adding little drops of corruption to it. One day we will suffer a flood from where no one can escape. So, are we doing any good by securing good fortunes for our children by sacrificing honesty? Later generations may curse us for our ignorance. We are creating a hell on earth for them. This does not only include corruption, pollution of environment also counts. Think again.

One thing that bothers a person is that he might not consider himself ready to face a situation or responsibility. The reality is that a man is not ready to do something until he does the job. It’s only after he faces the situation, he realizes that he was ready.

An old person is left on his own, abandoned by his kid(s). The man sacrificed countless nights so that his kid may have a sound sleep. He sacrificed his own interests for taking care of his child. What he gets in the end? Abandoned by his kids, the old man might wonder – is it wrong to raise your own child sacrificing your own happiness? Our parents say that the smile on the face of your child makes you forget everything else and that is your happiness. But that does not worth much to an old lonely person. His children are well establishes and does not care to think about you. You feel like cursing them to suffer like you did, but you can’t. It’s not a mother-son or father-son love, but the selfish genes at play. Deep inside one still thinks, was your life worth living?