During the last few days, I have been talking to a German guy by the name of Daniel. We talk about things that every Indian talks to a German abt the first time they meet each other: cars and motorsport, beer and Hitler. Well, we talked quite a bit.
From him I learnt tht ppl in germany who are not employed get unemployment benefit(the whole of Europe has this system BTW)and the difference between the unemployment benefit and the amount a hardworking person makes is only abt 100 Euros!!!!!!!!! So anebody who wants to earn money by just sitting on their asses, Europe is the place for you to be. :-)
One other thing we talked about at length was how unhappy Germans are. German people are so sad, they are asked by their bosses to join laughter clubs, just to keep them cheerful. Supposedly, German people are the saddest people in the whole of Europe!!!!!!
Why is that??
Well, according to Daniel, there are various reasons, some easy to explain and others not so easy, but one of the most obvious reason is the German's need to improve. Germany makes the world's best cars(Chk out the World automobile company tree image below), the best famous musicians(Mozart,Wagner,Bach,Schubert etc.), a handful of philosophers(Neitzche,Goethe), the best scientific minds of Europe(Einstein, Nernst, haber, Max Planck to name a few) and yet they are not happy. They are not happy because they are not happy with what they have done. They always think they can do better.
If that is why the Germans are sad, I believe that all people need to be sad, especially, us Indians. We have this complacent attitude of being happy with our past laurels. We call out names from the dusty pages of history and even 60 years of independence still depend of Jawaharlal Nehru's heirs to lead this country. We are happy that india won 3 medals in olympics, when the germany has already forgotten how many they won during this olympics. Instead of dwelling in the past, we need to look forward. Because past laurels are nothing more than achievements we could gloat about, maybe, once a year at a conference or any other corporate function, but it should not be the centre of attention. What we should be doing is puttin ourselves to the test constantly and setting higher benchmarks by the day.