3 years in Spain, or what I learned about Happiness, Time and India

 

  

Happiness is a strange thing, for some it is an abstract concept, for some it is a fleeting emotion and for some people like me it is a state of being.

The house in Bangalore

Before I go on, let’s have a small thought experiment. Take one person who has a 2 bedroom apartment in the center of the city, has a car, a maid to do his cleaning and washing, decent enough salary, goes to a fancy pub every weekend, cooks only 5 times a week and eats out the rest of the time and lives with his beautiful wife. Now juxtapose him with another guy, who lives alone in a studio in a suburb, doesn’t have a car but walks everywhere or takes public transport, cooks all 3 meals seven days a week, cleans his own apartment, irons his own clothes, lives in a country where he doesn’t know a single person and cannot speak the language of. Now tell me who amongst these two will be happier?




Since I have asked such a seemingly obvious question, you know it is a trick question. You know the answer is that the second guy is happier, and this is right.

5 days before I
moved to Spain

After moving to Spain

When I was about to move to Spain I was 77 kgs, I ate and drank too much and had difficulty sleeping at night. My job even though a menial one was stressful and I spent more than 13 hours at work if I include the commute. I ended up working on a lot of weekends then bunking a lot of Monday with fake sick leaves. In addition to all this was the stress of getting a visa for Spain. I was miserable with no real reason for it. No financial difficulties, no fledgling business, no cheating girlfriend, no tough boss; really none of usual reasons of unhappiness.








The studio in Madrid

Cut to when I moved to Madrid. I worked 9 hours a day, left early on Fridays, had a half an hour commute. I ran every day, lost the excess 7 kgs and slept like a baby in my tiny apartment. Every day was a new day full of new things, each street that I took was a new discovery. Once I rode public buses in the city aimlessly just to see the city. I took out time to see the sunrise, the sunset and the night sky. I took out time for reading, for writing, for doing all the things that I thought I would do when I will have time.


 

 

The sea view room

Slowly it dawned on me that happiness has nothing to do with material things, on whether you have a car or not, whether you have a small house or a big one, whether you have 46 piece cutlery set or you eat out of the pot. It is something intrinsic. It is something inside you. You and you alone can make yourself happy. It is not dependent on your salary, your spouse, your designation in your job or any of the usual things that people associate happiness with. My most memorable vacation is not when I stayed in a 4 star hotel on Costa del Sol (yes, the place they go in ‘Zindagi na milegi dobara’) with a sea view room and champagne for breakfast. Instead, it a vacation I took in Lisbon where I stayed in a hostel, slept in a bunk bed in a dorm, ate a one Euro ham & cheese sandwich for breakfast and rode the tram to buy a beer to have it on a street bench.



My moving to Spain also made me realize a two other things. One is about time. I travelled a lot, to villages nearby, to a forest close to my house and to every other city that is everyone’s European checklist. When my wife was here a for a month’s vacation we covered Amsterdam, Paris, Rome, Switzerland and Ibiza in a month! Because we knew that our time was limited. This sense of urgency, this understanding that this will not last is a great motivator. In my humble opinion that is how life should be lived, with the understanding that it is an ephemeral thing; that we will never be here again, we will never be in the same moment again. Our time here is limited and that is what makes our lives beautiful. When I was in Bangalore I always wanted to go to Bylakuppe, it is small Tibetan settlement around 80 kms from Mysore, I made the plan many time and then cancelled it by saying we can go any time, and of course I never did go there. That is because I always thought I had unlimited time. Don’t most of us do that? We think we can do this any time and we wait for some perfect time for it. When we will have the weekend totally free, when we’ll not be as tired, when we will have a little more money, when the weather is a little better, when all our friends would want to go etc. etc. You know the answer to all these whens is never. There is no better time than right now.

 

These however are not the only thing I realized. I also realized that I should respect us Indians a little more. I used to think we are exceptionally stingy, close-minded, conservative, littering, rapey, racist people. We are not. We Indians like to think we invented a lot of things like Nuclear weapons as Bhramaastra, Airplanes as Vimans, the number 0 and surgery. However racism, crime, poverty are certainly not our inventions. We are just poor, illiterate and a lot us cramped up in a comparatively little country. The Spanish from the 1970s tell stories of how they conserved plastic bags to carry stuff in them and had metal plates. South Koreans did not have any music that was not approved by conservatives until the 1990s. Women get catcalled on the streets even today in Morocco and the women in Brazil still feel unsafe going out in the night they have a female only taxi app called FemiTaxi. And yes, the Filipinos throw a lot of garbage on the streets and pee in the open. The cause of most of our problems boils down to poverty. Since we do not have money we do not have good public schools or dustbins on the street. People cannot afford to build toilets in the house and no restaurant or café will allow them to use the toilet while they are outside. The police is understaffed, underpaid and under equipped to handle the crime. Most people cannot afford to travel outside the country and have never seen how the world is. Vacations are scarce and most people are overworked. Women and men are kept segregated most of their lives because of the crime and our conservative values and this manifests in weird ways. I can go and on but the bottom-line is that we are not inferior in any way, we are just poor and a little behind in the development curve as a society. Once our living standard improves our country will become better.