Chapter 2
Unhappy Me
‘There are two tragedies in life . . .’
—Oscar Wilde
One is not getting what you wanted, and the other is getting it.
In 2010, I was thirty. I wasn’t in Forbes 30 under 30, but I might as well have been. I was already living the Indian dream. I was settled in the United States and married to the love of my life, Shivani. My father was proud of me, finally. Shivani and I had similar tastes. We liked historic neighbourhoods and old houses. We liked taking strolls. Bohemian cafes. Late night drives. We had a normal amount of tiffs, usually due to a mismatch in moods and not being able to communicate in an emotionally mature way. Nothing out of the ordinary.
I was having a lot of fun. I could eat out all I wanted, travel, get high and play video games all day, every day. I didn’t have to work—at all. I was finally free.
The only problem? I wasn’t happy.
I want to talk about a tendency here that most of us have. When we are not happy, we blame anything in sight that might not be performing as expected. I’d say most Indian parents would say they are not happy as their kids are not performing as well in school as other kids. Or, because they aren’t married. Or, because they have married someone that wasn’t the parents’ first choice. Or, because the kids haven’t had kids of their own. On and on it goes without them ever acknowledging that they aren’t happy as they never learnt to be happy! No smart person will ever get in a car not knowing how to drive and start driving it with an expectation of doing it right. Yet, that’s our expectation from life. We never learn how to live, how to be happy, yet think we can live a good life and be happy. It’s easy to see how silly that is with external things—such as a car—but, like any other internal mental function (or dysfunction), we are just so blind to it.
Anyway.
I didn’t have anything I could blame! Not only had I checked all the checkboxes on the template that’s handed down to us, I was also free! There was nothing wrong with me physiologically. I wasn’t low on vitamin B12 or D3. I wasn’t chronically under-slept, dehydrated or malnourished. Yet, I was not happy. In fact, not being happy was making me more unhappy . . . which was incredibly sad indeed. This sadness was making me want to kill myself. I wasn’t emotionally overwhelmed to the point where I would be blinded to its impact on others around me though. So instead, I decided that I will try to learn how to become a happy person, for which I first had to learn how to become a person.
Chapter 3
A Small Breakthrough
‘Life swings like a pendulum backward and forward between pain and boredom.’
—Arthur Schopenhauer
We are trained to become a professional whatever, but not to become a proper person. Nobody teaches us about personhood. We get a manual for the gadgets and machines we buy, but none for ourselves. I needed an education in being a person. I started spending more time at the public library in Tucson. It was there that I got the education I never received at school.
Now, places like libraries—where there’s a lot of information or stimulation—can be overwhelming for me. I don’t know why I am like that. Maybe because I am curious and everything interests me.
I understand that all of us can get sucked into information and that probably has an evolutionary basis. Early on, people who had more information—where are most bushes with berries or where are the cleanest safest streams of water—fared better than others and got to pass down their genes. Which is why we—the modern version of berry hunting apes—get sucked into everything from celebrity gossip to infotainment provided by YouTube educators.
Anyway, my tendency to get sucked into an excess of information has always been dialled to the max, and a simple quote I’d read early on in my life by a poet, Jalaluddin Rumi, has helped me keep it under control: ‘The art of knowing is knowing what to ignore.’ Great statement, except to know what to ignore, you need to know what is not of utility, and for that you need to know the purpose.
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