On a hot summer day our gang was chilling out at the Club when the topic cropped up – What is Luck? We all believe in luck – right? How else can we explain the suc-cess of those we dislike? It is in fact so true that nothing is as obnoxious as other people’s luck.
We started discussing and soon these points emerged from our Luck-Manthan:
• We agreed that anyone who we are declaring/deciding to be Lucky is undoubtedly successful (in the common materialistic scale of wealth, power, fame, etc) and we personally feel that the person does not deserve this success.
• We also agreed that Luck always seems like it belongs to someone else.
• We accepted the fact that most of us regard good luck as our right, and bad luck as a betrayal of that right.
• On a lighter vein – Luck is just like the College Diva who was every student’s heartthrob in college, always drawn to those who least deserved her.
• The general public’s life story is similar to the man who said, I’ve had bad luck with both my wives. The first one left me and the second one didn’t.
But if we go beyond comparing, complaining and criticizing and try to decode Luck without the malice of envy, jealousy or ego, we start having a clearer picture.
We start to realize that Luck is not an accident that happens to the competent. We see that those who work the hardest are the ones who have the most luck. And that diligence is the mother of good luck. We realize that Luck has a way of evaporating when you lean on it too much. Luck is indeed a dividend of sweat. The more you sweat, the luckier you get. While us normal folks are busy calculating that the chances of something so patently absurd, for actually happening in our life, are millions to one, the lucky ones are those who have calculated that the million-to-one chances will crop up nine times out of ten – and strangely they do for them.
Whenever, we fall short of our expectations, we blame it on our bad luck (aaj-kal luck kharaab chal rahi hai). We never know what worse luck our bad luck has saved us from.
(To be continued… Part 2, next month)
