Happiness?
A friend wrote to me a mail with a rather prfound question. It was after a career-counselling session at IITK. Her HOD talked of two kinds of success:
Success A : Big bucks, cars, moneys, houses etc etc
Success B: Research, Papers, Fame, Academic Rekknown - this is what 'good students' must strive for!
And then she wrote - "'happiness' got left out - inadvertently, i'm guessing...."
It got me thinking - and this was the outcome:
Happiness - Well, the pessimists will say it does not exist. Philosophers would say that it always exists in something you do not have! Personally, I am 'happy' about at least one fact - that we belong to the class of people who have the luxury of being in a position to think of happiness beyond defined standards of 'success'. It is indeed a pity that most of us still do not think about it. Its left out of career counselling sessions - my guess is because they can't do better - there are no standards here and only counselling/advice one can get here is my universal (useless) advice - one has to decide for oneself :-)
Not as profound possibly, but whatever!
Categories: Thoughts
Success A : Big bucks, cars, moneys, houses etc etc
Success B: Research, Papers, Fame, Academic Rekknown - this is what 'good students' must strive for!
And then she wrote - "'happiness' got left out - inadvertently, i'm guessing...."
It got me thinking - and this was the outcome:
Happiness - Well, the pessimists will say it does not exist. Philosophers would say that it always exists in something you do not have! Personally, I am 'happy' about at least one fact - that we belong to the class of people who have the luxury of being in a position to think of happiness beyond defined standards of 'success'. It is indeed a pity that most of us still do not think about it. Its left out of career counselling sessions - my guess is because they can't do better - there are no standards here and only counselling/advice one can get here is my universal (useless) advice - one has to decide for oneself :-)
Not as profound possibly, but whatever!
Categories: Thoughts
posted by Jaya @ 2:17 PM
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1 Comments:
At Wed Feb 23, 04:44:00 PM 2005,
Jaya said…
Since I am removing the Haloscan Comments, I am copy-pasting the comments I got on this post here.
--
Frankly, career counselling needs to be done by people other than our profs (like a professional - I think IITK has enough money to hire one or even the students can contribute). They, barring a few, simply are incapable of thinking differently.
In unrelated news, they are rebuilding the corridors in Hall 5! Amazing that they found another way to waste funds...
MadHat | Homepage | 11.09.04 - 8:16 pm | #
happy diwali
Ramnik | 11.14.04 - 12:50 pm | #
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