The Unending Struggle: A Companion to Every Life

While driving from South Mumbai to North Mumbai, at the junction where you turn onto the Western Express Highway, there stands a statue of a mother and infant. Beneath it, four words stop you in your tracks: "Child Gives Birth To The Mother."

It is a profound idea. The moment a child arrives, a mother is born too and with her, a new kind of struggle begins.

The First Struggle: Arrival

Long before the child takes its first breath, the mother has already been fighting for nine months, nurturing, protecting, and willing a fragile new life safely into the world. That struggle does not end at birth. It simply changes form.

Parents become a shield. They worry about health, education, friendships, and values. As the child grows and steps beyond that shield, their worry shifts  are the right choices being made? Is the future secure? When their child finds a life partner, new anxieties surface: Have they chosen wisely? Will they be happy together? And when the children eventually leave to build their own homes, the parents are left navigating the quieter, slower struggles of old age, hoping, perhaps, that their exit from this world asks no more of them than their entry into it asked of their own parents.

Struggle, it turns out, is the thread running through every stage of a parent's life.

The Child's Journey: Learning to Exist

For the newborn, the world outside the womb is an immediate challenge. How do I feed? How do I be heard? Every milestone, turning over, lifting the head, crawling, pulling up to stand, finally walking with cautious, wobbling steps, is a small act of struggle and triumph.

School brings its own battles. Some children compete fiercely to stay ahead. Others are uncertain what they want, while some quietly carry the weight of a parent's unfulfilled dream. By the time academics end and the real world begins, most young people arrive at the same humbling realization: it was not enough.

The Working Life: Climbing and Competing

The professional world is relentless. Those who upgrade their skills stay competitive; those who don't are carried along by the current, wishing for a better life but unwilling or unable to reach for it. Those who do put in the work switch roles, change organizations, earn promotions, and climb. But reaching the top does not mean the struggle ends. It simply opens a new horizon. Now the challenge is to stay at the top to keep hiring, innovating, and leading with purpose.

Even when outcomes are entirely beyond your control shaped by internal politics, market forces, or plain bad timing you keep trying. And it is precisely in that trying that the real struggle lives.

The Entrepreneur's Battle: Building in the Open

Few struggles are as visible, or as relentless, as the entrepreneur's. Building a brand from nothing, surviving long enough to find customers, then scrambling for funding to sustain what is just beginning to work is a gauntlet most do not finish.

Look at how India's digital economy unfolded. When Flipkart and Amazon were establishing dominance in e-commerce, Zomato and Swiggy carved out the food delivery segment. Just as those players found their footing, Zepto and Blinkit appeared with the audacious promise of ten-minute delivery forcing even the giants to respond with their own quick-commerce offerings. Some founders quit their own companies and started again elsewhere. The cycle never stops. Competition does not allow it.

This is the nature of markets: every time someone reaches the top, someone else begins climbing.

The View from the Summit

There is a popular assumption that the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies must have, finally, arrived somewhere restful. They have not.

Their struggle is simply different. They must sustain leadership, anticipate disruption, and innovate before competitors do. Consider Google: for years, it held a near-monopolistic grip on search. Then Microsoft-backed OpenAI introduced a new model of AI-powered discovery, and suddenly that dominance was in question. Other AI players followed quickly. Google stumbled in its initial responses, then steadied itself  but the pressure on its leadership during that period was enormous. The view from the summit is not peaceful. It is exposed.

The Quiet Struggle

And what of those who have made peace with where they are? Those with modest ambitions, content with what they have?

They struggle too  just differently. The desire to keep up with daily needs, to make ends meet comfortably, to wish quietly for a little more ease: this is struggle in its softer, more private form. No less real for being unspoken.

The Full Circle

Reflect on a single life from beginning to end:

As a child, you struggle for independence. As a student, you struggle to find direction. Entering your career, you struggle to stand out. With a raise, you struggle to maintain the lifestyle it promises. With money secured, you struggle to find time. With children of your own, you struggle to give them what they need. Growing old, you struggle to keep pace.

The struggle to enter this world does not end until you struggle to leave it.

A Final Word

The poet Harivansh Rai Bachchan gave us a line that cuts straight to the truth:

"जब तक जीवन है तब तक संघर्ष है!" (So long as there is life, there will be struggle.)

And yet, he also offered something more than a statement of fact he offered a way to hold it:

"मन का हो तो अच्छा, ना हो तो और भी अच्छा" (If things go as you wish, that's good. If they don't, that's even better.)

His meaning is generous: when your plans fall apart, it may simply be that something greater is being prepared for you.

Struggle, then, is not the enemy of a good life. It may well be the very shape of one.

The flavor and intensity of struggle differ for every person and every season of life — but no life is untouched by it.