Success Again

It is almost a truism that it is the 'unsuccessful' who have a multiplicity of reasons for their lack of success. The successful, almost invariably, have only one reason. Of course, it is their own inimitable abilities and dedicated hard work that yielded success. Luck? Only the losers prate of luck!

Being unfortunate enough to belong to the former category, I need to exercise all my ingenuity to determine why success has eluded me. The main reason, of course, is that I never did understand what constituted success - as I have explained in great (Excruciating? Not at all. There are too many of you people intent only on spreading unhappiness) detail in my previous post. But why was it so difficult for me to identify what was success?

In the not too long gone past, the successful man was the master of his time. While lesser mortals toiled to earn a living, the man of success had the time to go chasing after foxes, whacking a small ball all over the place trying to put it into a small hole and other such eminently important pursuits as would take his fancy. It is true that success was determined at birth and the only contribution of the person to the success was being prescient about selecting his parents - but that is not the point. The point is that a successful man was a man who had the freedom to use his time as he saw fit.

Having read extensively about success of this sort, I was all agog to succeed myself. Not that I had anything against foxes - and everything against strenuous physical exertion - nor was I particularly keen on working at putting a ball into a hole only to have someone else take it out immediately. It was just the fact of being able to do anything with my time and I would have used that liberty to laze around in bed and desultorily read a book. So, as I said, I was keenly anticipating becoming a successful man.

Society played a scurvy trick on me. Suddenly, I found that all the successful men were people who were saying things like,"Oh! I cannot make it this evening. I have an important meeting"; "How I wish we could catch up on the good old days. Unfortunately I can spare only ten minutes" and "I hardly get to see my children. Too busy traveling all over the world". I would have conveniently assumed that these were the failures of the world but for the fact that they say it all so proudly and seem to expect you to genuflect in their presence, full of gratitude that you had been granted the privilege of hearing a few words from them.

So, apparently, one works 12 hours days in order to achieve a successful upgrade to a position where one could work for 15 hour days. If you proved your mettle there, then you may ascend the dizzying heights of being able to work for 18 hours a day. And, all the while, you would have a Smart phone hanging around you like a dog's leash to ensure that you did not feel unwanted by your office during the rest of the time. So, you could be woken up at 2 AM by a tug at that leash - just so you feel all the more successful - without even the dog's pleasure of being able to lift a leg and piss on the other guy's trousers.

I am a sort of hide-bound character and find it difficult to change my ideas all at once. To me success still meant being the master of my own time.

Oh! And, by the way, there was one way whereby I could have been successful both in my eyes and the eyes of Society. I came to know of it when a friend of mine said that his driver was now a multimillionaire thanks to the fact that his dad had a few acres of land near Sarjapur Road in Bangalore.

It is thanks to the fact that my dad made bad investments that I have not achieved success. Instead of investing money in the stupid exercise of trying to get me educated, he should have bought land around Sarjapur Road.

So, now you know why I am not a success. It is all my dad's fault!