Whoever said I was happy and content? The question is not about whether I am, rather, whether I can afford to. Question is not a personal one, since happiness and contentment is not a personal prerogative or creation. Had it been so, we would not have had relativity attached, to declare someone else unhappy and discontent.

You can be happy only at the cost of causing unhappiness to another. Happiness is not some god-given personal trait. It’s an acquired basic indifference. The point for me, is not to become happy. The whole aim of this life in this era is not to become happy. Intentionally not to become happy. Nothing can make me happy. Its happiness for all, or happiness for none.

There’s been researches all over the world assuming the innate human nature to be one in quest for happiness. Partly and articulately forgetting that happiness has nothing to do with one’s quest. Happiness has to do with the conditions that cause it to be acquired by some.

The conditions need to be made such that the happiness shall be for everyone. That condition which makes some happy (very happy, delighted and all those variations) while letting others perish in gloom and hopelessness (to be happy) needs to be condemned. The first step, then, is not to be happy. Because personal happiness derives from the condition of happiness, not the other way round. The world will not become a happier place if you smile or join a laughter club or any other wishful thoughts. It will only become little more tragic. Idea is to separate happiness from the conditions, then prepare the conditions for upliftment of spirits for all the peoples in the world, all the ecology, the entire surrounding. Then the spirit can culminate in happiness. The advocates of personal happiness call it utopian. I call it the only alternative we have. If each and every one does not find themselves in a condition which is capable of providing each and everyone the measures of equal and where applicable, special opportunities resulting in happiness, then damn the personal happiness. Damn the individualism. Damn the survivors, who only survive after destroying others. The hugely content person is a saddist. Damn the saddists!

One precondition to happiness is ‘forgetting’. Forgetting the past, the history of sad past. From the psychologist who encourages the client to forget, to the ruling class who redefine the past according to convenience, they all are apostles of happiness. Because mostly people will be happy. Majority will be happy, they proclaim.

Only if! The majority are indeed sad. When the veils are removed from the conspicuous tortured pasts, when the history of humankind is sought to be studied in the light of what has created the present differences (and not in the light of the present freedoms and past glories and all that sermons), when the monuments (and all the bloody ‘wonders’ of the world) shall be declared as pyramids of historical human torture, the majority will find the answers.

Indeed the majority cannot be happy. Hence there needs to be a balance. A balance of sadness. The sadness needs to prevail first. Each one of us, every one of us, need to take responsibility of the past, by not forgetting it with convenience of some personal family craps-we call duty, but by reliving the history which was a given by our fore‘fathers’. Each one of us has to remember the genocides, the world wars and the civil wars caused in the name of private properties, religions, races, gods, caste systems, nationalities, languages, geographical territories and in the current age, in name of democracy and terrorism.

Remembering holds the key. Not forgetting.

Remembering not the past fathers of the movements and all the bunch of nationalists trying to free nations (hindu nation, muslim nation, black people, aryan race) or all the self-proclaimed superheroes of the wars (the burden of the white man on their shoulders), but remembering only the toiling mass struggle against the interests that were imposed to the contrary of social good. No condition for social good can ever produce a nationalist or a hero.

Nationalists produce more nations and more nations produce more conflicts. We have to remember the history’s lessons. Not wait for historical figures.

This age is not ‘new’ age. Not even when its called the age of information technology. As always has been, the technology of the age has suited the purpose of the ruling class. To suppress the majority. New age is a different age. It’s going to be radically different age. When the issues will not be whether you have access to a P4 machine or a electronic voting system. Because in this new age, such frivolous ideas will not be considered as issues. Issues which remains to this date will be resolved then: the issue of food, clothing and shelter.

Women and men will not work together so that they will be called mankind. They will not be educated, so that they can work within a system waiting outside the spheres to enslave them into a trap of subdue-workaholic-wage mentality. They will not have sex so that they will get married to members of opposite gender and form a family to fit into a pattern of family unity or a vote bank for that matter. They will not eat cheap junk food to quench their hunger and get energy drinks to work overtime. They will not get paid by hours and days and months and years only to be thrown out of the work one fine day without an explanation. They will not be encouraged to assume television backdrop of laughter as entertainment or meaningless cribbling amidst sophisticated club houses as privileged leisure.

Call it utopia. Call it by any other name. I shall think of more ideas how to make it even more so. Share your ideas as to how to make the world, not a better place and all that shit, but how to make a different world. All the existing laws of human society has to change. Even the thinking as to how the society will be. Or need to be. We had enough of happiness over illusions. Lets share our sadness over the realities.

__Saswat Pattanayak, November 2003__