Happiness Day 4: Give a little love!

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Happiness Day 3: Betty..Bitter.. Better..Butter?

Oscar Wilde said “To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all.” 

I said " I refuse to just exist. I choose to thrive. I choose to evolve. I choose to challenge myself"

I woke up really content and happy this morning, the weather was great, I got breakfast and tea served in bed by my Mary amma, got dressed in time to work and then came the SMACK in my face--TRAFFIC! I wanted to drive by the lake on my way to work because I wanted to play good music and feel the wind in my hair but instead I got stuck in vicious work traffic. I didn't let it tarnish my spirit and stayed hopeful! I got to work and I found a great parking spot so I was all up and chirpy again. I then went up to the office terrace to have chai and experience the whole wind-in-my-hair and BAM!- the sun came up and ruined the entire feeling. Even then I decided to wait out the entire day and see how it goes. I traversed through all the emotions Darth Vader did, but at the end of the day in spite of my ridiculously high expectations of happiness..I'm Happy =)

I'm Happy because:

• I made up my mind to be so.
• For once I quoted myself =)

Happiness Journal Day 2 - Big things always come in little packages

“Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it.” 

I made up my mind to be happy no matter what yesterday and yet this morning I woke up grumpy, feeling sleep deprived and absolutely mad at myself for not making it to the gym at 6 am. To blow off some steam I decided it was better to get online and check emails, Facebook etc. than yell at someone and make my day worse! 

The minute I logged in, I already had a bullet point for my post today; My friend Prateeks comment on the blog made my day. It got even better when my postcard-sending-heart-warming-random-bar guy-turned-platonic-friend told me he was coming to visit me in January (yaaay!).

The power of thought I tell you! Make up your mind to have/do something and all else falls into place. The 2 minutes it took this morning to change my mood from awful to awe-full made my conviction even stronger that happiness is never about big sweeping circumstances, its always about the little things. Always.

So, I am happy today because:

• " I decided to write today again after a long hiatus, making a lot of other people happy! " 
• I am super excited about my January visitor.
• My friend Priyam is back from a loong vacation! yaaay! I missed him tons!
• Maadu - the damsel in distress is relieved from her issues for the day and I was relieved for her.
• My mum and I had a big bad fight last night and we sorted things this morning. *good sign*
• I said what I was really thinking. I hate people who beat around the bush and  sugar-coat things. I believe in being direct and owning up to not knowing something. I embraced the awkward by looking at it square on and that made me feel lighter!
• A late night call that was scheduled at work got cancelled and I made it to the gym after work. Nothing beats a good workout and a cupcake after :)

Happiness Journal Day 1 - Setting the stage

Søren Kierkegaard said “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

In order to understand life backwards I need an account of everything that has happened/keeps happening, hence I've decided to keep a Happiness Journal =)

Reflection is an important part of happiness, and pausing to reflect on a positive event from each day cultivates gratitude. (An added bonus: Later, when my memory is defunct, I will look back at all the meaningful adventures I have recorded!)

Today I am happy because--
- I decided to take charge of my day and make it go as I want it to and not let the day rule over me =) I kick started the day by meeting an old friend which was long overdue.

- Someone I know is so adorable that a pack of color coded Mentos makes them giggle with amusement. I like people who take joys in trivial pleasures! Makes even the little things seem so worthwhile.

- A blind kid who gained vision as a teenager thanks to advancement in ophthalmology; a subject I covered when I was working with the Times of India, messaged me today after 3 years to ask me how I was and if I remembered him. Made me feel so significant suddenly.

- My best friends dad who could have had possible health complications is free from the vicious hospital woes.

Freedom is not free!

The wiki black out to me felt like city lights receding, like i was spiraling down a rabbit hole losing sight and going into a thoughtless coma. I could not get information at a click anymore. Well maybe squandered resources but not whole information which is categorized the way I’d like to see it.It was only yesterday i realized how i depend on the internet for everything. My imagination is anyway restricted to posting things that do not involve the government, but now to get restricted information is pushing it.

In a war for supremacy and a thirst for power and also to stand out mainly; the govt- which is basically the brain dead fraternity, makes stupid decisions which affect millions. I'm not saying that this doesn’t affect them, it does but in ways they cannot fathom because these people have assistants for everything...to write their speeches to take their calls...so they only see the cause and not the effect in the big picture. These people with power and influence lack intellect and vision. Their opinion is not a measure among the common people...people who rely on free internet to go through daily life. To me the internet is a free space where i can share my thoughts and read others opinions, but apparently now the government has to okay my posts and only then can i share it.
I am not writing to complain about the flawed governments- but to highlight the new kind of ingratitude that exists.
We talk about freedom of speech of thought of religion and how is all that lost when it comes to information?

The internet is an architectural marvel of free information. People get degrees, learn musical instruments, read books, gather information and can get a lot done. It was developed to bring the world closer which is probably why we termed it the World Wide Web. It is so powerful that it brought down governments and this- in my opinion makes a certain section of the society uncomfortable. The right to information demands transparency and in society so fraught with insecurities and loop holes the internet is too powerful to exist without being tamed.

I'm going to end this with a quote that Alfred de Vigny in his 1832 drama Stello said "la race toujours maudite par les puissants de la terre" (The race which will always be cursed by the powerful ones of the earth)

Tags Boxes and Symmetry- the myth.

They say everything comes at a price. A tag is attached to everything we do, we wear, we think. Relationships have a tag- long term and short term. These tags supposedly exist so that things stick in our memory. Like a great record the music rendered has to have a tag it has to be classified under a genre, it cant just be music because that would be too vague for people to understand.

Talking about understanding, we need to undertsand things in order to feel significant and that significance is tagged to happiness. The bottom line of everyones life is that we want to be happy. Happy being successful, happy being looked up to, happy high, happy with someone, happy being powerful, happy memories, happy being surrounded by happiness.

But Maybe happiness didn't have to be about the big, sweeping circumstances, about having everything in your life in place. Maybe it was about stringing together a bunch of small pleasures,things that cannot be tagged.

I cannot organize the emotions i feel inside me for people to fit one word like love or hate, neither can i lyrically explain the joy i feel when i listen to a good song. the tagging of things makes them categorical and things in categories are for aisles in supermarkets. Arrangement sure does bring about discipline and makes it easier to find things..but relationships and emotions arent things.
More often than not i have made friends with people who aren't my 'type' or people i have the least in common with and i have realised that the combination of inexplicable feelings is what allows people to hinge together. Most times people dont have answers for why they love someone, they would have instant replies for why they hate someone or why someone irks them. This is because the real things in life cannot be classified.

Point is-- we are all going to die. eventually. So if we spent less time tagging and putting things into boxes and being terrorized and flattened by trivialities..we'd be better off.

Smack Down? id rather just shrug.

Our strengths arise from someone else’s weakness. Believing we are better than some and we can outdo the others is what keeps us going. Is it because we are weak as individuals that we work as a human network bound by emotions and relationships? We see the light in situations and miss out on the shadows. It’s in the shadows that our weakness lies, where the inner child of our being is rooted; the one that craves attention, requires pampering and the constant affirmation from the everyday people in our lives that keep us sane and strong and most importantly secure. We have this self to recover from that place…the path we refuse to tread scared like a child in the darkness of the night.
Strength is a fleeting phase, this illusion we sometimes encounter or sometimes make synchronous with god. We cannot handle the weight of situations on our own.
Under the pressure of trying to be strong.. Ayn Rand makes me feel comfortable,,

"If you saw Atlas, the giant who holds the world on his shoulders, if you saw that he stood, blood running down his chest, his knees buckling, his arms trembling but still trying to hold the world aloft with the last of his strength, and the greater his effort the heavier the world bore down upon his shoulders - What would you tell him?"

"I…don't know. What…could he do? What would you tell him?"

"To shrug."

Shrug. When in doubt when the world gets too heavy and the human connection gets weak or lets you down. Don’t run. Shrug.