Dear Jeyamohan,
I am watching your videos continuously; they are very inspiring and thought-provoking. I am a scientist and now have reached the age of retirement. I am retrospecting my past in a glance and feel betrayed. The entire society, the intelligentsia of our new world, had done irreparable damage to my life. To be precise, I lost my life.
I was a hardworking student, and my entire school was encouraging me to concentrate on my studies more and more vigorously. My school had an ambition to project me as their flag of victory to the world, and I fulfilled their expectation. Then I became a science student, and the same thing happened again. Everyone wanted me to be their cup of victory, and I was running madly for that goal. People told me that becoming a scientist was the pinnacle of human existence, and I successfully attained it. I got a PhD, I worked at various prestigious labs, and I did some postdoctoral degrees.
These science fields developed a kind of totally insane lifestyle for their scholars, and everyone considers it a productive mode of life. “Work, work, and perish”—I can specify that like this. I too worked for more than 16 hours a day and slept in the lab on most of the nights. People told me that I was leading a highly valuable life for humanity, with the entire world depending on scientists like us. I used to look down on the ‘ordinary’ people with a supercilious sympathy.
I never imagined that I was losing my life. Now I understand that I never had any joyful moments in my life except the usual ‘success’ and ‘motivation’ parties that our labs used to coordinate. I never had any spiritual or artistic experience. I never had a calm and serene mood in my life either. I was working on a collective project, the whole picture of which is beyond my perception. I was a part of a huge machine that was running at its speed.
My health has deteriorated, my good days have passed, and I feel alone and abandoned. You are reiterating in your speeches that life is too short and precious moments are very rare.You are insisting that we have no time to waste. I can feel it now, but the life is already over.
I want to say something from my personal experience. Today, we instill in the entire society the belief that hard work is the only path to success. That is sheer nonsense. Indeed, in this competitive world, hard work is essential for success in any field. But life is not a competition. We are not in a race. We are not here to work but to be fulfilled and content. Work serves as a catalyst for happiness. We have a fixed time and health to spend. We have to decide how to spend it effectively. We shouldn’t waste it. But if we bet it on only one thing, we are the losers.
Success in the material world is essential; the spiritual and aesthetic evolvements are more important. We have to bloom on all sides. A man who doesn’t have an inner development throughout his life is actually a corpse silently perishing. I know I am writing this in anguish, but I am sure these are my honest words.
M
