Attitudes and Aspirations

Different people want different things in life and have different expectations. I do not say it is wrong to have a certain attitude or that there is only one right attitude. This is an attempt towards examining what people aim to achieve from what they do. I begin with a small instance which happened to me. A friend of mine told me about a yahoo group dedicated to quizzing and the only question that I asked was about the name of the group. When I told this to another friend of mine, his first question was about the prizes that we would get if we answered the questions correctly. When I was looking for only fun, enrichment of my knowledge and the satisfaction of it all, he was looking for material gains. Why was there such a marked difference in the direction in which our thoughts travelled? I believe it is because of our attitude and our aspirations. We do things in life for different reasons and for me it has never been about material gains, whichever action that I was involved in, but rather about the glory and pride of doing it. I do not know whether it is good or not, but that’s what works for me.

What we want out of our actions motivate us and drive us to perform our tasks so that we can get the ultimate price, but in the Bhagavad Gita, Lord ShriKrishna advices Arjuna not to worry about the result of our actions, but it is only given to us to fulfill our duties and carry out our actions whatever their results may be. But in these days, rarely do we find someone who is engaged in a task without worrying about the result. If we are able to stop being concerned about the result, but perform our actions to fullest efficiency, then I gather that the results would be good whatsoever.

These days, the driving force behind anything that we do is money; it is only about the financial gains that we are worried about. The earlier concept was that 'Knowledge is Power Supreme'(the slogan of my college incidentally), but it would be closer to the truth if I say that knowledge is the means to make money and more money these days. Greed, the one thing that we must all avoid, but one thing that enslaves us even without we even know about it. Even when we aspire to be in a good college, the main driving force would be the money that we would be getting on completion of the course rather than our thirst for knowledge or hunger to learn more about our world. I must confess that if I am asked why I wanted to join a good engineering college, I would have to say that it was to gain a good job, but not any noble intentions of pursuing greater knowledge in order to do good for the mankind or such any enlightened aims. My aim was only to gain admission and thus gain more certainty about the salary that I would get, but it was not in the wildest of my dreams to become a good engineer or to study well, something which I find is common to many others and this is the reason why have I lost my way in college, something which I must rectify if I am to succeed in life and do justice to myself, this world, to life and to my parents. We must fulfill our duties and tasks and not worry about the outcome in order to lead a better life and to achieve success.

We must fulfil our duties and tasks and not worry about the outcome inorder to lead a better life and to achieve success. If we do what we are supposed to do in the right manner, success will follow invariably.