About luck, again

I notice that it is nearly twenty years since I started scribbling (or rather, typing) these musings in my diary. I was 38 then, I am going on 58 now. My daughter was virtually a baby then, she is very much a grown woman today. Over these last two decades, I have been musing often and again over the role that luck plays in our lives. Of all things, reading Thomas Picketty’s unlikely classic Capital in the 21^st century set me thinking about how luck has affected my life so far, and how it is likely to in the days to come.

 

I, for one, believe ever more strongly with every passing year that luck (or fate, or God’s will, call it what you like) plays a crucial role in everybody’s life (some are born to über rich parents in advanced countries, some are born severely handicapped, some see their lives and/or savings destroyed by war and inflation) – and this, without giving up the firm conviction that every person ought to take some responsibility for his own life, and do his utmost to achieve certain aims he considers worthwhile. And so far as I am concerned, I can look back and see how strongly luck has affected my life, for better as well as for worse.

 

I have been lucky that

 

1.      I have lived so long. In India, it’s hardly something that can be taken for granted!

2.      I have been reasonably healthy and whole for so long: so many people become handicapped, ill or decrepit pretty early in life.

3.      I have had my parents around, fit and active for so long (so many people lose one or both in their youth, or have to carry them as helpless burdens).

4.      I have never had to do disgusting things (like crime, flattery, servility or some essentially mindless, pointless job) for a living, and I have on the whole greatly enjoyed what brought me and my family our daily bread.

5.      My daughter was born healthy and whole, I have been able to give her a good upbringing, all things considered (and absolutely delighted in it) and now she is an active, self-supporting adult.

6.      She still loves and respects me in very apparent ways, and even listens to me most of the time!

7.      A lot of people have tried to hurt me, and many have cheated me, financially, socially and emotionally, but no one ever managed to do really serious damage.

8.      I have been able to indulge my hobbies – reading, writing, watching movies, counselling people, sleeping a great deal, relishing good food, living in quiet, clean and safe surroundings, walking, swimming, travelling for pleasure – for so many years.

9.      I can still quickly strike a good rapport with youngsters in large numbers.

10.  The pandemic did not seriously hurt me!

 

… and I can easily add several items to that list without having to think too much. That was just to show that I am not a habitual whiner; indeed, many honest readers will admit that I attribute an uncommonly great deal to good luck for the way my life has worked out, instead of taking credit for everything I have ‘achieved’. Therefore, when I list some ways in which bad luck has troubled me, no one should decide that I am wallowing in self-pity.

I think I have been a victim of bad luck in the sense that

1.      Despite my parents being more than normally good people, I had a very lonely and insecure childhood, the scars of which still trouble my dreams, and, I think, have made me more permanently stressed and melancholy than I might have been.

2.      If my father had made better practical decisions when he had the choice – and he had far more than I ever did – my life could have turned out to be very different, though I am not saying necessarily better.

3.      If my immediate boss and the super-boss at the newspaper had not almost simultaneously resigned and left just when I was beginning to grow wings, I might have been a heavyweight senior journalist hobnobbing with VVIPs and pontificating on TV and syndicated columns in return for vast paychecks today: again, I’m not saying that would have been ‘better’.

4.      If all those hundreds of old boys and girls who once gushed over me had kept in touch and spread the word around, I would have been a celebrity today. I was just not destined for that sort of thing.

5.      If I had figured out much earlier that that schoolmaster’s job was simply wasting my life, I’d have been a much richer man today.

6.      So too if inflation had not remained consistently high and interest rates had not fallen so much over the last decade and more – things entirely beyond a single ordinary man’s control, and therefore attributable only to bad luck.

7.      So too that I live in a country where there is virtually no social security for ageing self-employed persons like me (though they number in the hundreds of millions), and that I fall in the same income tax bracket as the richest tycoons, who earn thousands of times as much as I do!

 

There have been one or two other things besides, which I do not wish to bring up on a public platform. Or maybe I will, when I am too old to care.

Enough of cribbing. I have always liked to look ahead. So here’s a list of things I wonder about when I imagine  how luck might affect me in the years to come.

1.      Will I be fit and active for quite some time yet?

2.      Will I live long enough to be a grandfather, and be one half as good as my grandfather was?

3.      Will I find one or two good friends in my declining years?

4.      Will I be able to live out my old age in at least modest security and comfort?

5.      Will my passing be quick and easy?

6.      Will I be remembered by some, or forgotten almost instantly?

 

I really do think that no matter what I choose to do from here onwards, it is chiefly luck that is going to decide those answers for me.

P.S.: It is always a pleasure to see some old posts coming back into the most-read list: A most frightening prospect (how the issue has dated and faded from public memory, just as I had sardonically predicted!), A girl who admired her teacher (nothing has changed in all these years) and What sort of person am I? Do look up some of the comments on those posts too: they make interesting reading.

(something's the matter with the line spacing. Readers, please excuse)