Need Vs. Desire?

As an eight-year-old, birthday is perhaps the only occasion when your faith in cosmic ability to hand you your most cherished gift is tested to its limit.

It was my eighth birthday celebration, and I was busy pinning all my hopes on receiving my brand-new cricket bat as a birthday gift. For that small kid with big dreams, not having a new willow was the only thing preventing him from becoming the best batsman in the country.

It took that kid more than a couple of decades to understand that when people strongly desire something, such as a new bat or Bentley, they might feel like they ‘need’ it — but they don’t actually need it. At least not in the way they think.

Invariably, desire (even after acquiring that most cherished bat or Bentley) fails to bring us joy because it is, by definition, emanates from something we feel we lack.

Which means deep down inadequacy in us often gets manifested in form of different desires.

In fact, if you care to look beyond the obvious, you will find that man is the creature who does not know what to desire, and he turns to others in order to make up his mind. This is called mimetic or imitative desires.

Because desire is mimetic, people are naturally drawn to want what others want. As a result, if you perceive some career or lifestyle or twitter account as…