YOU CAN’T WIN IN GAME OF LIFE

It was a chance discovery. Some two decades after the death of my father, I was just going through the book shelf in which his personal books, diaries etc were stacked. While going through the different rows, I found some diaries kept alongside the books. As I browsed through the pages, I could find some small notes written. They seemed to be flashes of ideas, thoughts or reminiscences. But in one of the diaries, I found a 10-line scribbled note that appeared rather strange. It was written on his 80th birthday as it was mentioned there.

The substance of the writing was that, “Today I enter the 80th year of my life on this planet. I wonder if an ambitious, hard and struggling life has all gone haywire. This is another and perhaps a more realistic way of evaluating the life’s happenings’’. I was surprised to read this because he was an accomplished man, an MBA of 1961 from Syracuse, US, a first class in LSW from Calcutta University, and one of the highest ranking Coal Industry executives of his time. If this was how a person like him evaluates life, there is need for a deep and thorough assessment of what life is all about. But yes, it is like that.

When Amitabh Bachchan has to say that “at this age and time of my life, I seek peace and want to be left alone’’. If someone like him desperately seeks freedom from prominence and wants to be left alone to lead the last few years of his life with and within himself, and admits that he does not seek headlines because he doesn’t deserve them, life needs to be revisited. And the one conclusion is that in the end everyone is a loser. This is how our being fades into nothingness. You can win those numerous battles that you encounter and have that feeling of being somebody who has accomplished, but you can’t win that war, the final one.

This is what we learn from the life of Lord Krishna. After the Mahabharata war, Gandhari curses Krishna saying that he was the cause of the war and responsible for the death of the Kaurava clan. He, therefore, would face similar fate and will perish along with his entire Yadav clan. Lord Krishna was unperturbed as he knew what was destined. He happily replied that he would look forward to that day. He was aware that his extended Vrishi family had become a burden to the mother earth due to their haughtiness and pride, their ahankara, and they must be annihilated. He could foresee that.

If Krishna was so helpless that he could see all his clan perish in front of him, the predicament of lesser mortals can be well imagined. Life, then, is largely a series of events controlled by forces of providence that somehow make us believe that we control them. But the fact is that we are but a small part of the huge design this universe is and play the role destined for us. And finally, we have to depart with the feeling that there were many items on the agenda that were still to be finished. The crux of the lesson is that you can’t win, because in the end everyone is a loser.  Life is not about winning or losing. Life is an unfinished agenda of desires and dilemmas.