All my life I have worried about my “enemies”. My enemy is defined by the dictionary as someone who is actively opposed if not hostile to everything I do and stands in the way of my achieving success and happiness. During my tenure at the Japanese electronics giant Sony my first boss, Fusao Ishii gave me the following advice: “The key to success is to identify who your enemies are and to remove them from your life even before they have a chance to stand up against you”. Somehow, I knew this long before I joined Sony, but my perceived enemy kept on changing over the years and I had difficulty in identifying my real enemy.

As a child growing up in India, I knew that the British were our enemies. The history books were full of accounts of their tortures, atrocities and discriminations against the dark colored natives for their own gains. I was inspired by the stories of freedom fighters who stood up against the British and sacrificed their lives in the process to free our country. I went to a mufassil school in Chandannagar, Kanailal Vidya Mandir, which was named after the martyr Kanailal Datta. The good news was that I was born after independence; the British were already gone.

My parents were from East Bengal which became East Pakistan after partition and had to migrate to Kolkata. I heard horror stories from my mother about how she and her family had to escape leaving behind a large house and all other material assets for fear of being killed by rioters. I was led to the belief that Pakistan was our real enemy. Even Muslims were brought into this purview, though my best friend at school was Rezaul Karim, a Muslim boy.

When I was in college in Kolkata, I had to enroll in a mandatory NCC training program because of some ongoing military conflicts between India and Pakistan. We had to go to the “maidan” every week to participate in various exercises. Going there in the early afternoon was not a problem but returning home during rush hour was a nightmare, especially trying to hop onto a crowded bus with heavy military boots. It often brought me to tears, but I was told that it was all worth it to be prepared for our enemy. Even today, most Indians seem to be full of glee at any demise of Pakistan, whether it is flood, economic downturn, defeat in a cricket match or political turmoil.

Then came the violent Naxalbari movement which shut down our Presidency college for four months. I discovered that the real enemy was the communist extremists with a Marxist view. The chaos in our everyday life resulting from the Naxal movement led me to migrate to the US for higher studies. Fear of the communists, especially the Chinese and the Russians continued for many years even after I came to the US.

During my professional life, I felt that my real enemy were the Mexicans, even though they were harmless timid people as individuals. It was a two-pronged attack; our jobs were disappearing in the US as a result of companies, large and small, moving operations to Mexico because of cheap labour costs. At the same time, Mexicans were crossing our southern border illegally and taking advantage of the US system in everything from education to healthcare and burdening our social infrastructure without paying taxes. My professional life suffered because my employers (RCA and Sony) discontinued their facilities in the US and moved to Mexico. I was especially upset by the news of Mexicans entering the US illegally  because I had to go through many hassles and hurdles to become a US citizen legally.

In my domestic life I was unhappy and blamed it on my wife’s family. They criticised my every move, planned things behind my back and betrayed my trust. They were “ghar shatru Vibhishan” (Vibhishan, the enemy inside the home} using an analogy from Ramayana.

Then came 9/11. Although plane hijacking by middle eastern terrorists and the Iran hostage crisis were known before that, this was the first time that the Islamic terrorists destroyed iconic structures and killed 3,000 plus people on US soil for no good reason. There was no question in my mind that they were the real enemies. The 9/11 incident changed the lives of everyone in the world and not for the better.

However, I always wondered why some middle eastern countries hated the US so much. The answer lies in the efforts to force American ideology into them with the hidden agenda of benefiting American companies. Events over the past twenty years or so convinced me that it is the large corporations, and the capitalistic philosophy were the root cause of all miseries in the US and probably the whole world. It is the corporate greed that does not care about common people and leads to unhealthy food habits, inflationary costs, unnecessary vaccinations and never-ending wars around the globe that keeps our defense industries humming.

As I grew older and wiser, I started to pay more attention to conspiracy theorists. “It is all by design”, they said. There is an elusive global “Illuminati group” who decides the future of all nations: their economic prosperity, military security, population growth, political clout and so on. Whether it is the Corona pandemic or Russian invasion of Ukraine or 9/11, it is the illuminati orchestrating the developments behind the scenes and for their own power and financial gain. The big corporations, the media, the big pharma, major political parties–they are all under the control of the Illuminati. Our future is predetermined. The illuminati are the most dangerous enemy because they are invisible and hiding in plain sight.

One day, I had an epiphany. As I stood in front of a mirror and looked at my own image, I realised who my real enemy is. It is me. I am a species full of primal emotions and cardinal sins. All my actions and thoughts throughout my life have been selfishly dictated by these emotions. I have not achieved that bliss I have been searching for all my life and just wanted to blame my failures on some “enemy”. It has been my ego, envy, anger, insecurity, controlling nature, dishonesty, unrealistic expectations, frustration from unfulfilled desires etc., that were the barriers to my joy and satisfaction. No one else is responsible. I can now also see that all miseries in the world including war between countries, economic disparities, political hyper partisanship etc. are all initiated by egos, selfish acts and sins of “little people”.

I have finally found my enemy inside myself. Just like my boss Ishii had said, I must remove it before it can continue to stand in my way. I feel content now. I must free myself of those disruptive emotions to find that elusive happiness.

I say a prayer every single day: “I have surrendered to YOU completely and unconditionally. I do not want anything; just show me the way and I will follow. If you think my purpose in this life has been served, then take me home. I want to go home and lie down at your feet in eternal bliss”.

The writer, a physicist who worked in industry and academia, is a Bengali settled in America