To give happiness is considered a virtue. Please try and make others happy, say the thinkers. I don’t know what precisely they mean by that. So unless I meet one of them and find out the true meaning of the statement, let me put my ideas here and think.
If accidentally, I step on someone’s foot on a busy street, and the other person is not ready to accept my apologies, but thinks that he will be happy only by beating me to pulp, shall I let him do that? Should I reason with him, or make him feel happy. All right, I lie down here without offering any resistance and you please be happy by kicking me as much as you want. After getting so badly beaten, I try to reach a hospital and find out that the doctors and nurses will only feel happy by making me wait for endless hours. If I request them to look at me sooner, they will get angry because many other patients have to be attended to and the medical staff is over-burdened, or so one thinks. So I make them happy, by remaining in pain for long and then get operated wrongly. It was my liver that was injured, but the surgeon wrongly operated on my kidney. Shall I make him/her unhappy by complaining of this blunder? The poor surgeon is already burdened with work and home-related problems. How can I add to them? So? I keep quiet. What of my family? They want me to get healthy again and begin taking their care as soon as possible. But I am in no state of doing that. What shall I do now? How can I make my family unhappy? Some of them have planned vacations; some have to buy other expensive gadgets. If I stay in the hospital, who will pay for all those expenses? So I try going back to work and make money.
But I am so weak and hurt, that I cannot work. My boss feels that he will be very happy by removing me from the job. I accept that without protest. Protesting may make him unhappy. I walk out on the road and am very happy to be killed by a drunk driver on the road. In the whole sequence, if I take a new birth, and go back to every character of this story, I will be surprised to find that they are all are very unhappy with me. My family thinks that I cheated on them by not getting treated properly. My surgeon will think that I should have given him one more chance of operating upon me and making me sicker. My boss thinks that I left an important position that is now difficult to fill. The drunk driver thinks that I intentionally came across the car and got hit.
Life is very difficult, whichever the way you live. Should someone happily surrender to a rapist to make him happy? Strange thinking always produces strange and painful results. Before we start getting beaten by others, we must think about it and decide to find out if they have that right. Otherwise they will always remain unhappy, and we shall always get hit. Does this make us think?
