The world never needed anything
When animals don’t need a job to raise a family, why do humans have to?
Imagine a tiger sitting quietly in a jungle – at peace with itself. Is the animal bored? How would you know? But look at those little cubs. And there, look at their mother – the tigress yawning so royally. Do you see a happy family where no one has any job to do? This is a family which needs nothing but food! When a tiger gets hungry, it gets up, it hunts – and it eats. And then it sits down again – quietly – at peace with itself. What a life! What peacefulness!
Human beings are so different from these peaceful animals – aren’t they? Most of us who have never ever faced shortage of food – don’t even consider ‘eating’ as a good enough reason to keep living. We – the human beings – think too much – we imagine too much. Imagination – this is exactly what has led to all the different human societies, isn’t it? Imagine a primordial wo/man who has just found fresh deer charred by a natural forest fire. So far in her/his life s/he has had only raw flesh but at this very moment s/he is too hungry and too tired to hunt. So s/he decides to taste the burnt meat – for the first time in her/his life. S/he tastes it. S/he pukes. S/he finds the taste disgusting – raw was so much better. But s/he realizes that she is too weak to skip the only lunch available. So s/he tries again. Finally, s/he is able to stuff herself with enough meat and by the end of it – s/he quite likes the new taste.
Things get back to normal in few days. S/he hunts as she always did and gets back to eating raw meat. But s/he is a human being. S/he cannot just eat when hungry and then rest peacefully till s/he gets hungry again. One fine day, after her lunch, as s/he is ambling around in the jungle, her/his idle mind goes back to that day when s/he had to eat the burnt food. S/he wonders when would s/he get a chance to eat that shit again – definitely not till a fire strikes! Sigh! But hey hold on – wouldn’t it be super cool if I were able to create fire by myself – s/he asks her/himself. S/he would at least try.
S/he tried. S/he kept trying. S/he never succeeded. S/he died. But then, she was not the only human who thought so. There were others like her who could not rest in peace after having a good lunch. One of them did crack the funda of producing fire at will. The human civilization moved a step closer towards modern development. Later, many more discoveries / inventions took place – God, democracy, currency, electricity, bulbs, internet etc. Each discovery / invention was supposed to make our lives better. And yet, today, in the modern developed world, how much better our lives really are? Where exactly is this so called ‘development’ taking us towards? Because if you ask me, just like the primoridal wo/man, today’s wo/man is as restless and thinks and imagines as much after every lunch as he always used to.
Was it really necessary for us to shift to cooked food so that we had to keep burning wood to serve our improvised taste-buds? Did we really need a God so that each one of us could interpret Him differently and keep fighting with everyone else who interpreted Him in her/his own way? Did we really require the concept of currency so that most of our lives we kept doing a ‘job’ and worrying about our bank-balance? Did we need electricity, the bulb, the internet – anything? Isn’t each of these the mere result of our not being able to be happy and content and peaceful after we have had our food – raw? Shouldn’t we realize that we were born to be bored so that we could imagine – dream – do something new – create something new – and use up some more of earth’s resource, only to get bored again?
But look at you. Are you even doing that much? When was the last time that you imagined something new besides what you have been conditioned to imagine? When did you do something new besides what you have always been asked to? When did you dream last? It’s time you break free and do something that you feel like doing and not what the world thinks or needs – remember – the world never needed anything at the first place.
Happy Indepence Day to you.
Popularity: 5% [?]
Filed under: philosophy | 24 Comments »