Are you sure

· That ‘status’ is worth hankering for, that it has any real meaning?

· That anybody (other than maybe a few rockstars, sportsstars, presidents and celebrity billionaires – a few hundred folks on the whole planet) has any generally acknowledged ‘status’ at all? Is the average doctor or engineer or job contractor or banker – say your own father – known (let alone admired and respected) to anybody outside his little circle of colleagues, relatives, neighbours… town?

· That ‘status’ will give you security and meaning and purpose in life, rather than attract envy and malice and spiteful talk and so fill you with growing frustration? That’s what happens most commonly – have you found out yet? It would be miserable to find out after you are forty!

· That status (and security, and health, and love, and happiness – all the really good things in life) can be bought with marks in childhood and money for the rest of your life?

· That beyond a certain (quite humble) point money matters at all? I find that if I were alone, I can get along very well with Rs. 8,000 in Durgapur and Rs. 15,000 in Delhi; having a family, I maybe ‘need’ three times that much. Are you quite sure you ‘need’ a job that pays, say, five or ten times that much – even if you know it’s a boring, or embarrassing, soul-destroying job?

· On the other hand, do you want such a job, despite knowing that it will not really give you anything you want – like real wealth (which means you need at least a thousand times as much as the figures mentioned above), and might quite possibly rob you of leisure, and hobbies, and privacy, and love and health and other precious things like that in the bargain? Aren’t you selling your life short?

· And if that’s the kind of life your parents and teachers (whether in primary school or management school) are grooming you for, having already succeeded in convincing you that there’s nothing better to aim for and you don’t merit anything better, haven’t they shortchanged you badly? Are you still quite sure that they ‘wish you well’? Are you sure that you are ordinary and want to go on being ordinary like everyone else?

· If you are in your early twenties, you’ve still got time to make a big change. Ten years more, and you will be left with only worry and regret for the rest of your life … say another forty years? Does that sound good?

· Have you got any ideals? Has any of them become both successful and happy by doing the things you are doing, the way you are doing them? – mine haven’t, whether I think of Abraham Lincoln or James Herriot, Richard Branson or Tom Hanks, Dadathakur or Bibhuti Banerjee.

· Does buying and owning things – not because you need them but just because you own them – really make you feel happy? Does anyone ‘need’ 80-lakh rupee cars, one lakh-rupee watches, 10,000-rupee shoes and 5,000-rupee handbags – or ‘need’ to change them every few months to be ‘in’ with one’s peer crowd? Couldn’t an obsession with shopping and owning things and ‘being in’ perhaps be a sign of mental weakness or disease, quite akin to eating disorders or obsession with ‘looking good’ – a sign that a person’s life is absolutely empty of meaningful interests and occupations? Wouldn’t it be a better use of your time to look for such interests and occupations – whether they be learning music or reading or exercise or gardening or making happy families – than to keep on shopping, and fretting over how to pay the mounting credit card bills? Has it ever occurred to you that big business is making you and your peers dance to their tunes, like puppets on a string, like slaves, in the name of giving you a good life?

· Does love matter? Does love mean anything beyond habit and tradition and biological/economic dependence and ego-identification (I think I get angry when somebody criticises my father because I love him – maybe it’s only my own fragile ego, which greatly depends on my father’s image in my mind, that gets hurt by what may quite possibly be the truth? Or I love my mother because she feeds me without asking for payment and does all my cleaning and washing for me? – have you pondered over what Karan did to his father in Rang de Basanti?) Have you ever loved rather than merely wanted to be loved? Have you identified loving with giving? Do you often tell your ‘loved ones’ that you’re ‘busy’? Do you know how to take gifts with love? Do you know that time and comforting words and non-judgmental listening can be the greatest of loving gifts? Are you sure that without love anyone can be either ‘successful’ or happy? If so, why is there so much delinquency, drug-abuse, TV- and shopping-mall addiction, extra-marital affairs, rocky marriages, confusion that needs calling on psychiatrists, violence and divorce in so many ‘educated’ and ‘well-off’ families today (just read the papers!)? Are you sure you’re not going the same way?

· Have you ever thought ‘out of the box’, done something because you like/want to do it, instead of just blindly following the herd? (this may relate to everything from clothes and parties to schools and examinations, pujas to watching movies or chattering about cricket). Did it feel good, or painful and frightening?

· Have you ever carefully examined your attitudes (do you have any personal attitudes at all, or do you merely parrot the conventional ones you have unconsciously imbibed from parents, relatives and friends?) to things like work, study, health, leisure, love, money, sex, time, death and all the other important things in life? The best counsellors down the ages are unanimous that leaving aside luck (or karma, or God’s will – call it what you like) attitude decides everything in life. Are you sure your attitudes are not exactly the opposite of the ones you need to be really successful in life (for example, you are lazy and afraid to take risks and responsibilities and have no imagination and no special/valuable skills, yet you want the lifestyle of a billionaire – have you ever made the effort to find out what makes some people billionaires? Are you sure that accepting that you will forever be ordinary and learning how to be happy as an ordinary person won’t be the best attitude-change that you can make: NOW? Otherwise, when will you start aiming really high? Isn’t it getting mighty late already?

· Do you have any inkling of what the world is really like? (one way is to check how much you know about the lifestyles and problems of the poor or badly-off – more than half the population of this country still! Or are you totally hypnotized by the rich and powerful ten percent? Then again, have you ever read the biography of a seriously rich man?) Are you sure that outside your little sphere of ‘specialisation’, you will never ‘need’ to know?

· Ever tried a bit of charity? – It’s said to work for your own good, more than others’! Or are you sure (perhaps without ever trying!) that it’s no good?

· What about religion? Have you thought about your elders’ attitudes? Are they very religious? In what sense? Why? Does religion mean anything to them beyond practising certain rituals unthinkingly with others like themselves? If they aren’t religious, why not? And what about you then? If religion is bad or uncool, have you found something better?

· Do you have friends? Are you sure they are your friends? Have you tried to make friends?

· Are you sure that when you keep saying you are busy, you are not actually being merely lazy and forgetful and irresponsible? Have you looked around at people and tried to find out what they are ‘busy’ at? Surely mere gossip and TV and attending parties and shopping around and sleeping and eating cannot make anybody busy? How many people do anything but that – except when they absolutely must, like at examination time or when a job is at stake because one has got a tough boss? Have you ever cared to find out?

The above questions are all designed to make you think – really think, not like in solving inane school-math problems or plotting mischief against classmates or colleagues or choosing a hotel or beautician, but brainstorming about the most important things in life, all by yourself. That is what people like us need to do most these days, and are actually doing the least, on the pretext that we are busy and actually because we are afraid of thinking and would much rather dumbly follow the herd. Whether it’s Socrates or Bertrand Russell, J.K. Rowling or Robin Sharma (The Monk who sold his Ferrari), they are all asking you to think – but you either don’t listen, or pay attention to them for all the wrong reasons (Rowling is making so much money!), or don’t reflect on what they are saying, or forget everything promptly, and never try to APPLY what they are saying to your own life and see whether it makes life better for you.

So think. Then, if you like, get back to me. And if you liked reading this, get as many of your friends and relatives to read it as you can. I am sorry I didn’t put in any graphics – but that’s only because they are always designed to distract you!!