English Literature – Articles ☆ The Issue with Issues🤔 ☆ Shri Jagat Singh Bisht ☆

The world, I have discovered, has only one permanent issue—issues.

They existed when Lord Rama walked the earth. They accompanied Lord Krishna to Kurukshetra. If history is to be believed, even sages occasionally had issues, though they had the good sense to meditate before forming a WhatsApp group.

Now we have reached Kalyug, where issues have become so abundant that they seem to reproduce without parental supervision.

Broadly speaking, there are only two kinds of issues in life.

The first is the kind that every proud parent loves to announce.

“We have been blessed with an issue.”

The second is the kind every apartment resident loves to announce.

“We have an issue.”

The first issue is welcomed with sweets, songs and photographs.

The second is welcomed with emails, messages and extraordinary meetings. 

Curiously, both demand sleepless nights.

Parents spend years lovingly nurturing their issues. They educate them, encourage them, and eventually dispatch them to distant lands, where these very issues begin solving the issues of multinational corporations. Some rise so spectacularly that they become CEOs—Chief Executives of Other People’s Issues.

Back home, however, another ecosystem flourishes.

The Residential Society.

Here, issues bloom with remarkable enthusiasm. Some are substantial. Some are microscopic. A few exist only in the fertile imagination of highly gifted observers. Yet every issue enjoys equal constitutional status.

Fortunately, every society has its elected committee, whose unofficial job description appears to be: “To receive every issue with dignity, discuss it patiently, revisit it repeatedly, and occasionally solve it.”

This is no ordinary responsibility.

After all, issues are renewable resources.

Some disappear.

Some merely change their hairstyle.

Others refuse to leave the premises.

I watch these delightful exchanges from a respectful distance, trying to remain what the Bhagavad Gita beautifully calls a tatastha drashta—a detached witness.

It is an extraordinarily entertaining position.

The issue remains exactly where it was yesterday, but the discussion travels through engineering, economics, constitutional law, environmental science, psychology, meteorology and, before long, international diplomacy.

One particularly charming feature of these discussions is that technical matters attract the largest number of non-technical experts. Their confidence is directly proportional to their distance from the subject. Every society, I suspect, contains at least three retired cricket selectors, four constitutional experts, five civil engineers, six financial advisors and an unlimited supply of management consultants—all conveniently discovered during committee discussions.

Knowledge, after all, is free.

Advice is even freer.

Yet amidst all this good-humoured bustle, one truth deserves cheerful acknowledgement.

Committee members quietly devote their own time so that the rest of us may enjoy ours. They coordinate maintenance, respond to complaints, negotiate with vendors, organise Independence Day and Republic Day celebrations, bring neighbours together during Holi Milan and Diwali festivities, arrange Ganesh and Durga Puja, and somehow continue smiling despite receiving fresh issues before breakfast.

For that, they deserve not merely criticism when things go wrong, but appreciation when so much goes right.

Of course, a gentle reminder applies equally to everyone.

Residents should occasionally ask not, “What is society doing for me?” but, “What can I do for society?”

And those fortunate enough to hold office may remember that every office is, in the end, a service centre rather than a command centre. The chair is meant to support the person occupying it—not elevate them above everyone else.

Mayors come and mayors go.

Presidents come and presidents go.

Committee members come and committee members go.

Residential societies remain.

So do their issues.

Every sunrise brings a brand-new issue to the society.

And every now and then, somewhere in a happy family, another brand-new issue arrives—wrapped in a blanket, greeted with applause, and destined, one day, to solve somebody else’s issues.

Such is life.

The issue, dear friends, has never been the existence of issues.

The real issue is whether we can handle our issues with good humour.

Because if we can laugh together, even our biggest issues become… considerably less of an issue. 🪷

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