Yesterday a man named Sachin Tendulkar (an Indian cricketer) created history by becoming the only individual to have scored a hundred scores of a hundred or more in international cricket. For those on whom the magnitude of this achievement is loss, let me just say that I don't see this record being broken in my life-time or the next.
The occasion was met by a barrage of coverage on news media websites, congratulatory tweets, facebook status updates and a general sense of overwhelming euphoria.
Many of the facebook updates I saw told a story of how the the updater has waited with bated breath for over a year for the record, how it has given him genuine happiness, how his belief than Sachin is 'God' is now stronger than ever and even how watching Sachin bat on the cricket field helps him overcome a hard day at work.
Pure selfless happiness, anyone?
It's great to see that truly genuine and pure happiness still exists in perhaps the most material age the world has seen. It's a travesty that the locus of this happiness, like many other emotions that define us as humans, is miles outside our inner selves.
Social media has created a very flat parallel world structure where every spontaneous emotion that we experience and share in the digital world is laid out for potentially everyone else to see. A brief survey of these emotions tells a story of how disconnected with ourselves we have become as a individuals.
Humans are a passionate race. Some of us are overtly passionate, others passively. But no one is without passion. A sweeping glance at the peoples' lives as laid out for all to see by the powerful social media juggernaut shows how misplaced and misdirected our passions have become. One is very likely to find exclamations of happiness and joy like "woohoo!" , "yay!", "booya!" and "overjoyed!" in response to sporting events and records like the one mentioned above, the release of an eagerly awaited piece of technology or even perhaps the announcement of the latest version of a PC game. The opposite end of a spectrum is almost a mirror reflection. Exclamations of lament, anger, sadness and disappointment will very likely be posted in response to events like the defeat of ones favourite sportsperson/team, a piece of technology one owns not getting any future updates, a PC game being discontinued by the studio or even the cancellation of a revered sitcom.
Happiness. Joy. Lament. Anger. Disappointment. Sadness. Emotions that form the locus of human existence invested on objects, things and events that are fleeting by their vary nature. Houston, we have a problem!
A cause-effect analysis throws up many possible explanations for this trend. Like negligent advertising, misplaced patriotism, an increasing material view of one's success, decrease in ones level of social skills, ever-reducing opportunities to pursue ones aspirations to name a few. This however is in itself a deep topic that demands a collective introspection followed by a sincere attempt at individual and collective change.
Human nature however is quite perverse in its own way and any effort at identifying and remedying the causes for our increasing distant locus of existence will invariably take a tangential turn for the worse, possibly branding one asking these difficult questions unpatriotic, a heretic or maybe even plain loony.
A more practical path to tread would be to in a sense 'manufacture' your own motivations in life. A motivation that arouses your individual happiness, joy, lament, anger, disappointment and sadness more deeply than anything else ever can. More often that not, you will realize that such a motivation lies much closer to your self than a sports event a hundred miles away or a PC expo in another continent.
So the next time you see someones facebook status read "booya!" on a non newsworthy day, stop wondering. Perhaps he has found his very own locus of existence. It's about time you do too.
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