Jaygovind Sahu

Need Vs Want

Some­times I am con­fused about whether a par­tic­u­lar thing is my need or my want. I think it is nat­ural and many oth­ers also often cat­e­gorise their needs as wants and vice-versa. When it is about buy­ing an iPod or hav­ing a din­ner at an expen­sive restau­rant, it is ok (or bet­ter) to ignore a per­fect need-want analy­sis. But, I think we must know what we really need in our life as a whole.

What we want to do in our life is often not the thing what we need to. Choos­ing a career to earn money is our need and it is often very dif­fi­cult to make a good career out of your hobby or inter­est. Some­times I come across peo­ple who can eas­ily iden­tify (or may be they just pre­tend to iden­tify) what exactly their needs and wants are. I come across peo­ple who have plans in terms of hours (or may be min­utes) for months from now. These peo­ple seem to be very sys­tem­atic in every­thing they do. But, is not that very sim­i­lar to the way machines behave?! As human beings, one of the most pow­er­ful things which makes us dif­fer­ent from machines is our emo­tion. It is emo­tion which gives us the courage to take chances — bunk­ing classes of the dead­liest of pro­fes­sors to play com­puter games with friends or to go for a 11pm movie show with­out hav­ing any idea how to return home. It is emo­tion which enables us to mag­nify life and to live it in terms of sec­onds and not in terms of months or years. Those are the things how we remem­ber the finest moments of our life and those are the things, what I really think, are what we really need in life to remind our­selves that we are still nor­mal human beings. That is how the mean­ing of ‘need’ and ‘want’ converges.

I was born intel­li­gent. Edu­ca­tion ruined me.

I really believe in this T-Shirt tag-line. When I was a kid, there were very few things I thought, were impos­si­ble. That is same with every child. In child­hood, we have the free­dom to think what we want to; to live in the world we want to. As we grow up, we under­stand the world the way they teach us and we start real­is­ing — “Oh! I thought that was pos­si­ble when I was a kid. No, for sure, it is not.”. But it is not always about real­ity, it is some­times about the cre­ativ­ity; it is not always about money, it is some­times about hap­pi­ness and sat­is­fac­tion; it is not always about being sys­tem­atic, it is some­times about liv­ing life to the fullest…