My Bag

Raghu was sight seeing Toronto with his colleagues on a Sunday. They were walking in a park in the evening when one of Raghu’s colleagues, Sekar started to move his hands animatedly. They all stopped and looked at Sekar. Sekar’s eyes became wide open and he murmured something.

Raghu asked, “What’s the problem?”

Sekar exclaimed as he placed his hands over his head, “Gone!! All gone. I lost my bag. It had everything in it.. my camera.. my passport. We’ve been roaming Toronto all day.. I don’t know where I lost.. How am I to find it.”

All colleagues laughed at Sekar. Sekar shouted, “You ppl making fun of me!! You never know what I’m undergoing now!!”

Raghu smiled and said, “What is it… in your back?”

Sekar placed his hand over his back and felt his bag!! He was actually carrying his bag all day long but he forgot about it. Now Sekar was feeling very relieved and he quickly opened his bag and checked his passport and camera. He then sat in a chair in the park and smiled and said, “Now I’m happy!!”

Raghu came near Sekar and said, “You were carrying this bag all along. You cried b’coz you lost and now you are happy since you got it back. But it was always with you.”

Sekar took a couple of deep breathes and stood up and the group started walking to their hotels.

After thinking for sometime Sekar said, “Isn’t it very easy to make a person happy. .. You rob him of an object and he grieves and you give it back to him and he will be very happy. He would not have been happy if that object was with his always, but a delta.. just a change… a moment of loss followed by a moment of finding makes him happy.”

Raghu quipped, “So you are saying that in order to make a man happy, you’ve to make him sad first.”

“Exactly!”, exclaimed Sekar, “This Sad and happiness is kind of a sine wave. You need the dip of sadness and the altitude between the sadness and happiness to get the euphoria.”