What is Pleasure?

This article was written for my official blog on January 10, 2009

What is the definition of Pleasure?

It may be a matter of opinion, like in any other definitions.

Pleasure is the result of an act – or a combination of acts – that makes one feel as light as feather and elated as high and close to the edge of heaven, congruent with moral and social ethics, and one in which all who are involved shares a reasonably same proportion of joy, and one that can be remembered as an event or series of events that years later will still bring smile on one’s face...; pleasure is something that you experienced or visualized as experienced, and that the experience can be shared with your sons and daughters, with joy and laughter, like you read a bed-time story...

...in having pleasure, integrity becomes the corner stone; values become the key driver; it can be as simple as weaving a garland of jasmine flowers and as rich as having an explosive orgasm with the person of your dream...; it could be as simple as a stroll in the woods on a Sunday morning; it could be as personal as a night spent on the river bank...and often derived from even an act as small as the attempt to define pleasure.

The CEO and board of directors of ENRON in United States, Sathyam Computers in India and many more failed to define pleasure beyond their sight of individual joy and personal greed heedless of the human creed!

That may be the bigger version.

What parallel can we run from the corporate catastrophe of ENRONs and Sathyam’s to our personal life?

What is it that we can improve in our daily administration of life- replacing Corporate Governance with Personal Governance? Are we too perhaps fudging and skirting our emotional account books of behaviour projecting its non-existing credits to gain merits by stepping over the shoulders of our colleague or a neighbour or a... family member?! Are we too perhaps hiding within us facts and events that perhaps if audited by SEBI (System of Ethical Behaviour Internationally – my version, of course) will expose us to shame?

If we were to go blue or our eyes turn red or our hair stand up every time we think or behave unethical - from lying to gossiping to all the other shapes and forms of it as we know for now... what a different world we would be living in!?

The streets would be a sight to see....; the offices would be a place to be!!

And what about a “wonderful family” watching TV at home?!!

It all depends on how we define “pleasure”..


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