मस्ती की पाठशाला (Masti ki Pathshala) worldview

Few years ago, the Bollywood song ‘मस्ती की पाठशाला’ topped the music charts. The song expressed the youth’s desire to freely and unrestrictedly explore the world and people in pursuit of pleasure and rapport, thereby echoing the predominant mentality of the current generation. It was an overnight hit! Even nowwith similar mentality– more and more people are increasingly spending time on social networking sites, WhatsApp-like messengers, city meetup groups, etc. This shows that people are searching after ever expanding elations through unrestricted search for relations through sharing their joys and sorrows. Media moguls and business tycoons have their catalogues full with offerings to cater to this pursuit of every individual – more and more freedom!  Pharmaceutical industries offers freedom through improved health and ability to enjoy pleasure, media firms offer freedom from boredom, IT companies offers the same through lesser manual overheads and better comforts by enabling the people to accomplish a lot right from their desk, etc. But we still find larger and larger segment of the population hooked to addictive use of internet, mobiles, drugs, sex, etc. People are physically debilitated, mentally exhausted, and are compulsively succumbing to their lower impulses resulting in insecure society – 'lose control' as expressed in that song. They even want freedom from all kinds of religious hangover, guilt feelings and inter-personal responsibilities or sense of duties. They are even ready to chuck overboard any conception of God, whom ultimately one is responsible to, according to codes of religion.

This type of ‘मस्ती की पाठशाला’ world-view is described in the Bhagavad Gita, chapter 16, verse 8:

asatyamapratisthamte
jagadahuranisvaram
aparaspara-sambhutam
kimanyatkama-haitukam

They say that this world is unreal,
that there is no foundation
and that there is no God in control.
It is produced of sex desire, and has no cause other than lust.

The results of this worldview are as follows.

•         Lack of dutiful attitude towards God, nature and other living beings.Since a God-less worldview doesn’t recognize any ultimate controller and accepts “chance” as the primary cause of events, it presents a separatist, independent and disintegrated image of the world, when it comes to deriving happiness. This is observed when everyone thinks in terms of his own personal sense enjoyment. From such a perspective, one gets blinded to the sufferings of other living entities in the course of fulfilling one’s personal desires. One even forgets all sorts of duties towards God, nature and other living beings of past, present and future generations – thereby spoiling the resources received from previous generations, and risking the quality of life of present and future generations.
•        Irresponsible lifestyle with self-destructive habits.The reductionism philosophy states that a complex system is nothing but the sum of its parts and that an account of it can be reduced to accounts of individual constituents. Equating and limiting life to just bundle of chemicals is a reductionist’s view of life. As per this philosophy, even the very goal of life becomes reduced to become obscure into oblivion. With such limited understanding of life, one loses respect for one’s own life as well as that of others. One also develops ‘I don’t care’ attitude about his actions and consequences of his actions since he thinks that everything happens by chance. Consequently, one lives an irresponsible life and cultivates various self-destructive habits for ephemeral sensory and imaginary pleasures of this world.
•          Frustration, depression and boredom. By following the above-mentioned lifestyle, one soon realizes that the blazing fire of desires instead of being subsided, multiplies in magnitude, till it consumes complete satisfaction of the self. One then becomes frustrated in his attempts and depressed in his life. After repeated attempts of squeezing the happiness by bringing senses in touch with sense objects, one becomes irksome and spiritually dullard.

In such a way, by being student of ‘mastikipathshala’ philosophy one repeatedly fails the tests of life and loses chance to be happy in this life and next.