Admit it. We've lost the art of Patience. Our lifestyles have changed dramatically over the past 10 years. With the hectic pace at which we live our lives, patience has been the biggest casualty. Imagine yourselves, in 1995, searching for a piece of information. You'd have to forage in bulky encyclopedias that Reader's Digest sent you ocassionally, in YearBooks from Manorama or CSR or contact people who were likely to know more about whatever you were searching for. Times have changed, and strikingly too. You have unbridled access today, to any information in the world today--at the click of a mouse as the saying goes. You dont need a doctor to tell you how complex your ailment is. Just check online. Its either Wikipedia, or the latest Wolfram. You want to know how much your bank balance is?Save yourself the trip to the local bank--and the protracted queues--get yourself updates on your mobile or check your online banking account. You're bored reading a two page article on the web, even if its on your favourite subject.And youcan always skip to the next tab--to google,or to Orkut or Twitter(my latest fad).Fed up of a 3-minute 'lecture' on the telly about an air-crash?switch to the next channel, an old movie--one that you've always wanted to watch. Engaging for 10 minutes and then it isn't exciting enough. So what?The next channel has got even more entertaining goodies lined-up for you.
Technology has made us its slaves.It has spoilt us, made us greedy. We want more.Even more. Things more valuable, more exciting. We've lost patience. We want things in a jiffy. Which explains why we had such obnoxious hoardings following the Mumbai attacks calling for the gunning down of politicians one-by-one and slogans such as 'Enough is Enough'. We just cannot fathom that democracy and the evolution of a nation, is a slow process. So are many other things. Many marriages today are on the verge of break-ups. Why?We've quarreled for a whole week. We just cannot live together anymore. One week's tenacity is how much a marriage is worth.People just dont give things time. So you're twenty-five years old and you still haven't made it big in life??So that probably makes you a loser, doesn't it?Suicide man, a quick-fix solution, thats what you should be doing. You've had a quarrel with your parents? Its time to move-out/run away and show them who's Boss!
Sure, things dont move at the same pace as they used to earlier. Faster times call for faster action, faster decisions. But Patience my friend, is at the bottom of your card-house. I remember narrating to a friend of mine a story I had heard about one of my favourite writers--R K Narayan. Heres the wiki entry relating the story...
"In the autumn of 1930, on a sudden spurt of inspiration, writing of his first novel “Swami and Friends” started. It was as if a window had opened, and through it Narayan saw a little town and its rail station, the Mempi Forest and the Nallapa’s Grove, the Albert Mission school, Market Road, the River Sarayu. Its inhabitants appeared, and Malgudi was born.
...
“Swami and Friends” was completed and sent to publishers. It repeatedly returned. Narayan dispatched it yet another time and gave the return address as one of his friend’s in London. He wrote to the friend requesting the manuscript be tied to a brick and thrown into the Thames if it came back. It did.
But the friend took it to his acquaintance Graham Greene, who was already an established author. Narayan received a telegram soon thereafter, “Novel taken. Graham Greene responsible.”
“Swami and Friends” was published in October 1935"
Narayan spent long years for his first work to be published--a truly agonizing period for a debutant writer. Persistence and self-belief are two off-shoots of Patience--'virtues' that our preceding generations possessed, something we've failed, as is evident from each spectra of our existence, to latch on to. There is a lot to learn from such great lives. Our lives, however, are governed by the transience of the moment, by instant rise and fall, by 24-hour news channels, by the urge for even faster broadband speeds, by newer airline operations, by compulsions of multi-tasking and of ostentatious lives,by preferences for magazines in place of books and for Google Chrome in place of IE(which require greater patience) by rock music (and worse--hard metal)...
I do not have a solution to provide if thats what a reader(s) of yours truly is looking for. Maybe as i chug along, I might discover, and if not, persist with intentions of the same, a solution. Till then please be Patient...
1 comment:
This post brought back memories of a word I picked up somewhere in my quest to understand human behavior, "Victorian complacency". The Victorian age in England, stretched for many years and was marked by profound changes in the way people lived and thought.So much, so that when Victoria's reign ended and the Elizabethan age commenced, the elderly who had lived all their lives as Victoria's subjects could not imbibe the changes of the new era.
Since then, the term 'Victorian complacency' has been used by psychologists to describe this condition that sets in, during old age.The aged usually exhibit this tendency to romanticize their lost youth and prefer to live ruminating the lost glory of yester years.And they immediately identify anything new as absurd or immoral; largely inspired by their alienation.
Having said this, I have discovered from my personal experiences that this condition is quite contagious.
Your disillusionment with the modern world is a mere case of 'Victorian Complacency'. There really is nothing wrong with the modern world in comparison to the Dark ages, the stone age, the times of the barbarians or our cannibal ancestors.
"It[Technology] has spoilt us, made us greedy. We want more.Even more...." Again, I beg to disagree. Greed, ambition,agressiveness, jealousy, anger and hate are all universal human emotions that are wired into our DNAs ( The structure of the DNA and the information that it carries has undergone no significant change in the course of human history). A study of the lives of our pre-social ancestors will give more insights into why these emotions were vital to their survival. Primitive man facing the adversities of climate, the wild, warring opposing tribes etc had no scope to be passive and merciful. The aggressive and stronger ones survived. We still retain these characters because we have not progressed on the Darwinian scale, though we have scaled great distances on the social scale of evolution. Man and his inherent weaknesses are not contributions of the modern age , rather the left overs of our nomadic history. It must be admitted also, that these emotions have no role in civilised society. What has changed is man's ability to invite greater catastrophes with his negative emotions. This, and not the emotion of greed, is a modern age phenomenon.
Regarding patience, its not just the bygone writers like Narayan who exhibited patience. Even modern writers like Marquez have admitted that they write no more than two sentences a day.
I do agree that patience is a virtue . We as Indians feel the need for it, more than anyone else. A nation of one billion people, we have to patient in the long queues in the cinema, the over crowded trains, the long wait for an LPG connection, the patient wait of parents to get an admission to their wards etc etc etc... :)
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