Pursuit of happiness is the goal of life; isn’t it? Didn’t Aristotle call it a subset of human flourishing; the fuller sense of living well rather than merely feeling good. Yet the classical definitions are at variance. Is happiness wild with desires and action, and living in a bohemian way without overly restrictive rules for the fulfilment of those desires (barring, of course, the savage and brutal acts that remain ultra in thought or deed) is sacrilege?Or is it, after all, about self-control and following established ethical social contracts even when those contracts do not demonstrably hurt anyone?Desires and the affairs that spring from them can be fully consenting and need not hurt anyone in any barbaric sense. The only real offence is often against a norm — the social contract of marriage.An affair of a CEO or a politician, if the fling or love has not been initiated with any expectation of return except pleasure itself, rarely alters professional decisions. One exception that society seems to tolerate more readily is that of creative people. We question them less; it is almost accepted that their moral values need not be tightly yoked to their temptations of bodily desire.Huang’s fate still hangs in public speculation, Bill Clinton lusted Lewinsky in Oval house so had Kennedy his Marilyn Monroe, And Harvey Weinstein unleashed wave of #Metoo, and so many others before and after them.The pursuit of love is ancient, and so are the stories and scandals of desire. People have suffered for them, yet readers have always enjoyed the juicy narratives. The media in modern times, and books across centuries, are full of it. Authors were often happiest when exploring the subject and rejoiced in depicting it in creative forms.Across ethnicities, the ethic of self-control repeatedly tries to stop us from straying into the art of seduction. Pleasure and happiness have been demonised as if it were a sin to remain in perpetual pursuit of happiness, even when that happiness comes from something as comparatively safe as consenting flirting and flings.Thrones have always had their own thorny issues. The spy was often the seductress consort of the crown; today the same pattern appears among tycoons and their top teams. Extramarital affairs are quite widespread. A leak is never merely the tip of the iceberg for the affected couples; it also supplies extra toppings for those who voraciously consume such tales.What makes the subject enduring is precisely this thrill. On one side stands the ancient suspicion that unchecked desire unravels character and social order. On the other stands the equally ancient observation that human beings keep seeking connection, intensity, and the private thrill of being desired. When the only parties are consenting adults, and when no coercion, no professional leverage, and no public harm is involved, the residual objection is often simply that a rule has been broken.The rule exists for reasons — trust, stability, the protection of children, the predictability that allows larger social norms to continue. Yet the rule is also, for many people, experienced as an artificial constraint on a drive that feels as natural as hunger or curiosity.Creative lives have long been granted a partial exemption. We have grown used to the idea that the painter, the poet, the actor, or the musician may keep a different timetable of fidelity. The exemption is rarely extended with the same ease to the engineer, the civil servant, or the corporate leader.Perhaps this is because we still half-believe that the products of the mind are separable from the discipline of the person, whereas the products of organisations are not. Or perhaps it is simply that artists have historically been poorer and less consequential in the short term, so their private arrangements seemed less threatening to the public order.Meanwhile the stories continue to be written and read. The same culture that lectures on self-control simultaneously rewards the leak, the memoir, the novel, and the late-night discussion of who did what with whom. The authors who explore these terrains are not usually writing manuals for destruction; they are mapping the territory in which most human beings already live, with varying degrees of honesty and varying degrees of damage.The reader who settles into an armchair with tea and turns the pages is rarely shocked by the existence of desire; the reader is more often curious about how desire is managed, denied, or allowed to run its course.None of this settles the question of what happiness actually requires. A life of unbroken self-control may produce a certain kind of flourishing:- reliability, public respect, the quiet satisfaction of having kept one’s word. A life that occasionally steps outside the stricter contracts may produce another — intensity, the feeling of having been fully alive, the private knowledge that one has not entirely suppressed a part of human nature.Most people negotiate some mixture of the two, rarely with perfect consistency and almost never without cost. The cost is real. So is the desire. Both have been with us long enough that the next leak, the next historical footnote, and the next novel will probably look more thrilling.The pursuit of happiness remains what it has always been: an imperfect, contested, and thoroughly human mission.Whether it is better served by tighter reins or by a more bohemian latitude is a question each generation, and each individual within it, continues to answer in practice rather than in principle. The stories, the scandals, and the quiet arrangements go on. The tea cools, the page turns, and the old argument between desire and restraint settles back, unresolved but never dull. After all, dil hi to hai ..
Disclaimer: Views expressed above are the author’s own.