Loss to Order
Though the Gautams managed to cross the threshold of middle-class meagerness, their top-drawer lifestyle began to tell upon them. By then, Sneha too had a Fiat of her own to have the thrill of being at the steering. But, as she had to crisscross the city to help Sneha Travels, soon she developed weariness for driving. Insensibly, Gautam too was himself caught in the web of the spidering spadework that he came to build. Thus, he could hardly make it home before midnight. What with Sneha too keeping late hours at her office, their home that came to be admired for its interior decor was reduced as their rest house. Before long, the physical tiredness and their mental fatigue took a collective toll of their sex life. And added to that, their filial fulfillment had to go begging for want of time for their offspring.
Often at bedtime, all this made them wonder whether they had got on to the wrong track of life. As that invariably led them to reminisce over their Sagar days, they were wont to think what a happy couple they were then. It was thus, they were at a loss to realize how their ambition had undone them after all! And that made them view their materialistic abundance with a sense of vacuity for want of emotional fulfillment. They were certain their true happiness lay in savoring their mutual admiration and not in gloating over the public adulation. Overwhelmed, they were wont to feel it was time they quit the rat race and settle down for a bout of domestic bliss. But their euphoric resolve of love invariably lost out to the materialistic allure of the world. Thus, bogged down by their rigmarole, they failed to imagine life in any other way than the way they were used to by then and thus they kept the course to acquire wealth. And so they began to lead their life robot-like to scale ever new social heights.
It seems contentment is a state of mind and ambition the urge to succeed. If not, why should the feeling of contentment insulate man from being ambitious? After all, isn’t the sense of contentment all about the realization of materialistic insignificance? Why, it signifies the irrelevance of the self itself? On the contrary, won’t ambition exemplify man’s craving for his social relevance through every conceivable means? Given the collective irrelevance of man in the universality of being, what is the individual significance existentialism advocates?
But the Gautams were all too psyched up by the past of their social plight to come out of the glamorous ditch they had got into. And yet, realizing that the drudgery of the toil was self-defeating, they delved into easy ways for a cozy life. Sneha felt it was time that Gautam began to snare fortune into the spidering network he had so painstakingly woven. And by then, Gautam came to realize that the real bucks lay in lobbying for the defense deals. But, he was aware that the hurdle to cross to set up shop was higher by a mile. All the same, egged on by Sneha, he reviewed the feasibility report prepared way back, which he had tucked away in a corner of his mind.