Rat Race

“The trouble with the rat race is that even if you win, you still are a rat”. Few would disagree with this but the real problem is that most of us fail to realise that we too are a part of this rat race and it is not some distant phenomenon happening to ‘others’ as we would like to believe. It is a human tendency to instantly start preaching someone about the secrets of life the moment we see them in trouble. Edward De Bono, classified this tendency as “I told you so…” syndrome. We just assume that the other person was dumb enough to land up in this kind of situation. It hurts to question our infallibility or scrapes our ego to think we too must have done something similar in the recent past.

Boss – Having endured thousands of bashings in school, I have learnt that some 70 % of earth is covered with water…I guess a better statistics to learn is that around 70 % of the working population are surrounded with their bosses…Like it or not, most of us work just to ensure that our boss doesn’t get a chance of saying “You didn’t do this even though I had clearly to do it…blah blah…...” It is another matter that the so called “clearly” is a tiny thought in his miniscule brain and it never came out of it…..Just do whatever has been told and you could steer away from trouble….People are known to have spent some 30 years doing the same job on the same desk….

Relatives – This class of people are almost uniquely identifible by their interferring and vociferous behaviour. Your father might be thinking of a relative as a person who is nothing short of a saint, but somehow you clearly see him as the incarnation of devil or the devil himself. It is really annoying to watch such miscreants get away with all of their crooked deeds. Zillion of your whistleblowing efforts are discredited as misbehaviour. So in the end , you just let these guys have their ways and strengthen your apathy…Kill your proactiveness spirit and live life with/without or inspite of them…

Other nuisance makers who are insignficant but never disappear from ur face…..The servant maid, some pissed off waiter at a restaurant or a non-coperating coworker are some of the people in this category….Your lessons of ‘customer focus’ or “One should have a vision in life” all get thrown out of the window in confrontations with such people. You just can win over them no matter how hard you try. You adjust yourself to these ‘fly in the ointment’ guys and continue to live an oblivious life.


To sum up the above points, it is really hard for most of us to break our little ‘universe with a idea bubble’ and realise the real meaningful things in life. The examples of such ignorance can be numerous and more articulate as well. My point gets served even if one of this blog’s reader realises one of their vestigial activites.