Real Success: The Long and Dusty Trail of an Unfinished Quest

 **2002**

What lies behind real success?

First of all, let us denote, in all sincerity and encompassing consensus, the meaning of real success.

Let me clarify from the first that the difference between “success,” the common noun, and “real success,” the qualified one with an addition which carries the whole essence, like honey in a flower, of the term, should be the unshakable, unflinching assumption for our further discussion.

By and by, let it remain as simple as this.

The differentials between success and real success can be seen as clearly, without needing even an iota of evidence, as that between day and night.

Let us begin with real success.

It is that finest, unadulterated spirit, brewed during long, perspiring, patient, honest moments.

This spirit is pure, devoid of any admixture of luck, chance, favour or any other short-cutting manoeuvre.

The sanctity of this brewery matches any holy shrine on earth.

Any attempt, in most of the times, in fact, the process, is left unfinished when the tired, uncompromising brewer breaks down, not to see the bloom of this earth but to see the light of some other world.

His tools lying there, his body lying like an unsung signpost.

It is inevitable as well, for the goals of real success are too great and big to be achieved by an individual follower during his lifetime.

So the process is borne on the shoulders of the brave conscripts across the generations.

They pick up the tools of the defiant, valiant volunteers and wage the war ahead.

And whenever any individual succeeds, the trophy is shared by the entire generation.

Too large are the repercussions of this achievement.

But who remembers those fallen heroes on the unillustrious and dusty path of real success?

People just see the puny avatar and the godly, divine one with the same eyes.

Then there are real successes at the individual level, a shortened, crisp version of the common real success.

Here the merciless brewing might go on for a few generations within the same family, like the one at the larger generational level in the society of the earlier case.

Fitting myself and my family into this smaller version of real success, I am entitled to notify my family for such a case.

I see a long and dusty trail of pains, pathos and travails, at least from the times of my great-grandfather.

Suppose I succeed in becoming an established writer or a civil servant, for which my father himself had a definitive leaning and which always prompted him to spend a large portion of his salaried income on books of various genres.

Who will read the long and wordy tale of disappointments, losses, even humiliations, spanning all his life and most of mine, in addition to the shaking repercussions and crippling vibrations of sustaining such a passion across a generation, and that too in a countryside family surrounded by almost illiterate farmers?

Given all the situations and limitations of such a goal under such a setup, where you are required to earn and learn as well, it was inevitable that this decent middle-class family tumbled in status to that of lower middle class with the passage of time.

How will people get enough time to read the mildly great lines of this neat and clean, real story of a big family quest for real success?

Here I am, having dashed all the hopes of a conventional career.

In the second half of my twenties, yet to earn a single penny and even orbiting like a perilous moth around the flame of my passion.

Read as many pages of classics as possible every day and write a few justified lines with pen and paper in a day.

Such is the goal.

You work really hard, as hard as anybody around.

Picture to your mind the feelings of your near and dear ones: the father long past retirement, sisters needing your support, mother too living every day from dawn to dusk in the barn, your brother who should have blossomed under your care but is waging the real, practical struggle of your path.

There is so much you ought to do.

And you deliberately kick all these deserving responsibilities to keep glued to the one beyond which you can't see.

You feel the guilt of it, the pangs of it, the more so seeing their uncomplaining faces around you as time passes.

You become unbearably guilty on that account.

But at the same time, you have been laying the foundation of some future superstructure.

What serves such a superstructure if it fails to meet the present petty needs of your family's lives?

Don't they stand to get such needs fulfilled?

It is usually torturingly perplexing, but I have gone too far, like an addict.

Can't even dare to look back now.