The Life We Are Given

I prefer to spend my time in the village here, but at times due to some work, I am forced to travel to cities. Recently I took a short trip to Delhi for some official work.

At the Kathgodam railway station, I saw a man sitting on the steps of the platform, eating from an old mithai cardboard box. There was nothing remarkable about him. His clothes were tattered. The box had already served its original purpose but someone had saved it for another use. He sat there quietly, eating whatever food it contained, while people moved around him with the usual impatience of a railway station – porters carrying luggage, families returning from vacation in the hills clicking photographs, occasional announcements coming over the loudspeaker, and some repair work going on at the platform behind him.

I was waiting for my seat on an air-conditioned train to Delhi. I knew that once I settled into my seat, someone would bring me food. I also had a small packet of home-made dark chocolates in my bag. Gourmet chocolates made by a young Parsi boy who has recently opened a small shop on way between Natadol and Kathgodam.

However, at the platform, the contrast was almost embarrassingly obvious. Here was a man whose meal was there in an old sweet box, and he had it while sitting on the steps of the railway platform. And here I was, worrying about my train, my seat, whether the coach will be clean or not, and thinking what edibles will I be served in the train.

I don’t know anything about that man’s life. I don’t know how he came to be there, whether he had a family, whether he had ever had a permanent home, or what his day had been like before I saw him. I don’t even know if he would consider himself unhappy. Yet I felt sad.

And, almost inevitably, I began thinking about the enormous lottery that is birth. What makes one baby arrive in a wealthy family and another in a poor one? Why is one born in a country where there is clean water, good healthcare, schooling and enough food, while another is born in a place where simply getting through childhood can be an achievement? Why am I sitting in an air-conditioned railway coach, carrying chocolates I don’t particularly need, while another person is eating from a discarded cardboard box?

On the other hand, why is it that I have to think about the condition of a mountain road before making a simple journey, while someone born in a Nordic country can take for granted a reliable road, public transport and infrastructure? Why do I have to plan around presence of education for kids and health facilities for my parents, water availability and also the dependence on monsoon, while in some of the world’s happiest countries these basic necessities are simply part of everyday life? Why does a winter in the hills mean worrying about heating to keep my family warm, while someone born in a Scandinavian home can take warmth, insulation and uninterrupted utilities almost completely for granted?

These are not things I achieved or failed to achieve. They are simply circumstances I happened to be born into.

We like to believe that life is fair because it makes the world easier to understand. The idea of karma offers one possible explanation. The Bhagavad Gita and other Indian philosophical traditions speak of actions, consequences and rebirth. Perhaps, according to this view, the circumstances into which we are born are not entirely random. There are things at work beyond what we can see in this single lifetime. But I find that explanation difficult to accept completely. It is one thing to believe in karma as a philosophical idea. It is quite another to look at a hungry person and imagine that his suffering is somehow a deserved consequence of something he did in a previous life. I don’t know enough to make that judgement. And perhaps nobody does.

Different religions have given us different ways of making sense of this. Karma (Hinduism and Jainism) says there may be a history stretching beyond the life we remember and guides us to make this life meaningful for others. Buddhism asks us to look at suffering and our response to it. Christianity asks us to care for the person lying by the roadside. Islam reminds us that what we possess carries responsibilities. Sikhism reminds us to share what we have. Whatever we believe about why we are here (or don’t believe in any of these), what matters most is how we treat the people we find along the way.

Another related matter is of success. We often speak of success as though it were a straight line between hard work and achievement. Work certainly matters. Discipline matters. Education matters. Luck matters too and in my opinion to a great extent.

Warren Buffett has often spoken about this idea of the extraordinary luck of being born into the right country, at the right time, and in the right family. Simply being born in the United States, and into the family he was, gave him access to opportunities, education and circumstances that made it possible for him to begin his life in investing. His talent and hard work were certainly his own, but even the starting point from which he began was something he had no role in choosing.

There is another, more immediate explanation for my own circumstances. My parents worked hard. So did my grandparents. They made choices, took risks, saved, sacrificed and, like everyone else, benefited from circumstances that were partly within their control and partly beyond it. Whatever I have today is not entirely the result of my own effort. I simply arrived somewhere in the middle of a story that had already been unfolding for generations. I was born into this family. That fact alone gave me an enormous head start. Had I been born somewhere else, to different parents, in a different country, my abilities might have been exactly the same, but my life could have been unimaginably different.

We don’t choose our parents. We don’t choose our country. We don’t choose our genes. We don’t choose whether we are born during a famine or a period of prosperity, into a peaceful country or a war zone, into a loving family or a broken one. And yet, once we grow up, we often look at the differences between people and describe them simply as the consequences of their choices.

That is one of the great illusions of being comfortable: we gradually forget how much of our comfort was never chosen by us.

The man at Kathgodam may have made mistakes. He may have made good choices too. He may have been unlucky. He may have been born into poverty. Maybe he worked harder than I ever have. Maybe he didn’t. I will never know. What I do know is that I happened to be born where I was born. And so did he. That thought has stayed with me more than the sight of him itself.

I sometimes wonder whether gratitude is the right response to such a realisation. Not guilt, because feeling guilty about being fortunate doesn’t make another person’s life better. And not complacency, because pretending that our good fortune is entirely self-made is equally misleading. I feel that gratitude, accompanied by a little humility, is more appropriate.

To recognise that I had the chocolates in my bag, a seat in the air-conditioned train, that the food that would soon arrive at my seat, and many other ordinary comforts in my life are not simply trophies I have earned. They are also accidents of birth, history, circumstance and the work of people who came before me.

The train doors closed, the train began to move, and Kathgodam slowly disappeared behind the window. The man remained on the platform. I still had the chocolates in my bag. For some reason, I didn’t touch them that evening. And even now, days after that incident, I still find myself thinking about the man at the station. Enough of my rambling for now. I feel grateful for the life I have been given, but also saddened by how differently life can unfold for people who began with so little. Perhaps that is all I can do with this awareness – to be grateful for what I have, and to help others whenever I can. Hopefully, better my Karma for an even better life in my next birth, or get out of this loop of birth and death.

Click here for all related posts – Browse my blog on slow and sustainable living !