The World's Biggest Race

There is one race that most of us been running irrespective of whether or not we consider ourselves athletes and that too in the biggest and longest race...often known as life's rat-race. Different people join in at different times but most people do join in at some time or the other. We start by running against the hours, progress to minutes and then finally to seconds and milli-seconds.

We want to be the best at everything we do and for this we run fast...so fast that we cant help ignoring the beautiful little things that come our way. We have hopes for more fame, more money, more this, more that...and for that we work overtime and harder to impress our superiors and in this process lose out time that we could have spent with family, spent in solitude simply gazing at the beauty that nature has to offer us.

Inspite of missing out on such things, it is still worth it if we achieve what our heart truly desires. But, unfortunately, a lot of us look back and ask our past whether there was any use running all the time only to find that our past can give us no answer. So can we slow down? Can we take a path where we dont have to run so much? No...comes the answer because we have built up a society that doesn't respect anyone who doesn't have the best of everything. We sneer at somebody who dares to tread a path which is not considered the very best of all. Somebody who doesn't earn in millions is considered a loser. Worse, according to many people, if you are not a software engineer or a reputed doctor working in a reputed multi-specialty hospital, you are nothing at all. "There must be something wrong with him if he doesn't want to take up such a lucrative profession",we say. We ingrain this into ourselves and even teach our children the same.

Why after all? Why have we built up such a competitive world? Isn't it time that we push for a change? Isn't it time where everybody is respected irrespective of whether they are the best or not? Isn't it time we allow people to do something that their heart truly desires and not follow societal norms in every step they take? Probably you will say, "All this is ideal (and even idle) talk". But for dreaming of an ideal society, you need some idle time and isn't an ideal society something that we should hope for?