What is FEAR?

I was reading the news paper(TOI) yesterday, when I gazed through one of the statements in the Speaking Tree section. It was written by " Swami Sukhabodhananda". The statement was very wonderful, "It's not wrong to have expectations, but our happiness should not depend on them ." This made me think a bit deeper into myself and I landed upon a very subtle aspect of human existence, FEAR. There has been a lot of discussion on what is FEAR and where does it come from. I need to correlate Expectations and Fear, or else this assimilation of words would appear incoherent. Expectation is the root cause of FEAR. We expect things to happen, people to behave in a certain way, events to happen in a certain way. Now, FEAR comes from the fact that expected things may not happen, people do not behave in an expected way. Sometimes it is the fear of losing something or somebody, which we never expect to loose in life. As Swamiji says, Its not wrong to expect, one's happiness should not depend on them, I totally agree to it. Even though we expect things to happen in a certain way, if our happiness is not dependent on the expectation, our state of mind, our very existence will never be deterred by the things, events or people not meeting upto our expectation. Well in our lingo..its called the " Chalega" attitude and its the fun loving guy attitude or rather a happy-go-lucky attitude. Once our mind is not deterred by such nuances, FEAR no longer has an existence. Expectations do remain but their perception changes and the attitude with which one co-exists with his/her expectations is transformed from one of dependence to that of independence. FEAR cannot blemish the mind any further. And once FEAR goes away..where is the question of one not being HAPPY at any state. We need to seek this state of HAPPI-ness and FEAR-less-ness.