Every so often at the traffic signal, outside the garden, or at any other random place of public gathering, it's not hard to miss little boys in tattered clothes, with toys in their hands, which they know they are never meant to play with. The toy-sellers. Your heart feels saddened knowing that theirs is a childhood that's never meant to play with toys but to sell one. How ironically poignant it is??
They sell toys to the more privileged kids and find happiness and these privileged kids in turn get happiness as they get to play with their favourite toys.
How inconsistent then is the definition of HAPPINESS??
Is happiness then a byproduct of our need or greed??
For a boy who sells a toy, happiness arises out of his need, a need for money, for survival. For a boy who already has plenty of toys waiting at home, happiness arises out of his greed.
Irony is life in action, a balance of opposites in perfect magnitude.
For every suicide attacker, we ve a soldier ready to be a martyr. For every weed, we ve a blossoming flower. For every ugly moth we ve a beautiful butterfly.
The world runs on a balance of opposites. We call that stark reality a contrast, nature calls it a law of existence.
But, is the toyseller never meant to buy toys for himself then? That's a question for which I have no answers. Yes, with time to come, we can only hope there are less toy sellers and more toy buyers. That's my wish for the new year.
But that's a wish too utopian.
May be there can be more even distribution of resources some day, until then, buy a toy from the toy seller, and gift it to someone and make both happy. That's the little we can do to keep the economy circulating, for the stable economy is the one where money changes hands frequently, isn't it?
Just some random rumblings....
- Devashish Palkar
