Lady Luck...

I remember once Mohit (my boss in Seagram for whom I had immense regard) told me, “Sandeep, remember, all you need to succeed in life is good stuff between your two ears”. For a moment, I couldn’t really understand what he meant (I wasn’t an MBA then and hence my ability to infer such could be simple but made complicated statements was pretty low…now, I relish such literature) and he could sense that. He went ahead to elaborate, ”Look, what I mean is you need luck which is personified by the forehead and brains to make it in life and while the importance of either cannot be undermined, if I were to prioritize I would be rank luck a notch ahead”. I agreed with him then as well but today I agree with him like never before. In the last couple of years, I have seen such absolutely nondescript people being in such good positions and at the same time I have seen some really good people being in such unworthy of places. I mean there is hardly any symmetry between what you deserve and what you get. While Mohit was talking about luck from a professional point of view, I don’t think the importance of luck is any less in personal affairs as well. Look at some people; they are so damn lucky. I know some friends of mine who have everything and more a person at their age could think of and then I see some more who have nothing at all. No career, no money, no love, no companionship, no present, no future. Everything exists. This thought further brings me to another point. Is it really necessary that everyone needs to have an equitable portion of luck on their side. I mean why is it necessary that luck should account for a standard X or a Y% of every person’s success? Is life really meant to be fair? I don’t think so. Fairness and equality simply doesn’t exist in life in a broader sense and it is foolish to expect it to be so. I don’t mean to undermine the importance of capability and toil but at the end of the day, all of us must be mentally prepared for a larger force deciding our fates and you might be either the blue eyed boy or a step son of that larger force and that creates all the difference. I mean life can be really unfair. I know of people who have suffered all their lives, struggled all their lives to accomplish certain things and no sooner they accomplished all of those, life just snatched all of it away in one stroke. I have actually being witness to people cry at the way fate has played with them. But hardly have I come across people who accept that they are successful because of fate. It’s really strange; if you were to take people at their face value, every successful person is successful because of his capability and every failed person is a failure because of luck. Some immodesty!!!Taking the thought a bit further, is there a limit to which luck could be bad. I mean there is only so much that a person can be fucked. Apparently everything has to even out and reach a steady state at some point or the other. As far as luck or rather the opposite of it is concerned, I doubt that it is so. I have seen people and really capable people facing defeats over and over again. I doubt if luck or more precisely bad luck plateaus out. In my opinion, what happens however is that these set of people get so used to being fucked that it stops affecting them any more…they simply become immune to pain in a way. Remember the Floyd number ..Comfortably Numb.