Friday, November 16, 2007

Mockery


In my last post I mentioned that taking pictures in Indian slums is a gut-wrenching experience, most of the times. But sometimes you find moments that haunt you for ever. I remember vividly going to this slum to take pictures. A bunch of people from different families were gathering up to pose. I took hundreds of pictures and came back. I uploaded the pictures in my computer and started to look at them. When I looked at this shot my mind just stopped with a gasp! Something did not match up! These were the people who were living in the most destitute parts of the planet and they had almost nothing. How could they smile like that?? Is it not the goal of every human on this planet to achieve happiness?? Over the years I have seen people living in million dollar homes and driving expensive cars but they carry dead faces that are incapable to smile. Are we missing something?? After consuming the resources million times more than these people, are we happy? Can we smile like them?? Because if we cannot then these people in the picture are mocking us!!!

2 comments:

christine said...

These people aren't mocking us, we just have different ideas of happiness. Americans are happy when we get our new iPods or a bigger t.v. We want the "perfect life" one of prosperity: the American Dream. These people live in totally different circumstances, how can we compare our own happiness to theirs?
People living in circumstances such as theirs find happiness in smaller things: connections with friends and family, food on the table for all of the family, etc.
Afterall, being happy doesn't mean everything's perfect, it means you've decided to see beyond the imperfections and do what you can with the life you have been given.

Navdeep Singh said...

Christine,

The main point of this post was not not to compare the two drastic social systems. The main point was to compare the resource use. We are getting our happiness from iPods, cars, and complex things that we make, that require the usage of great amounts of resources from our planet. I was just trying to ask a question that is complex use of resources making us more happy than those people who are not?