With the election season in India over, I have a few thoughts. During this election, I observed a few things with myself as well as others. A few things about what kind of people we generally tend to follow, what kind of people influence us, why do we get influenced by the people we do. This election was all about people being either pro Modi or anti Modi. A few people said this is a dictatorship, a few people were completely in love with Prime Minister Narendra Modi. Mainstream media was either treating Modi like a God or a tyrant (I am including big youtubers in mainstream media, because nowadays they are). I observed a few interesting things with people who choose to follow one or the other. People are generally very stubborn in changing their beliefs. The people who view Modi as God won’t get convinced against their opinion no matter how much you try. Even clear facts and statistics won’t convince them against Narendra Modi. People who view him as a dictator have the same story. They always tend to agree with something that is in favour of their opinion and disagree with something that is against, no matter how valid the opposite arguments are or how dumb the supporting arguments are. This is called confirmation bias in psychology. ...

Let’s talk about dreams today. Not the dreams that you see while sleeping. The dreams that keep you awake. The ones that motivate you to get out of bed and work. The ones that give you some purpose in life. We all have dreamt of something or the other. The dreams have been of different magnitudes based on the conditions around us and our age. For example, when I was in kindergarten, I used to dream that I will become the Prime Minister of India one day and all the criminals and “bad people” will run out of India. Now obviously that is ridiculous. All of us have had some ridiculous dreams when we were young. But we have had some serious dreams as well. I had a dream college. I wanted to go to IIT. I tried to achieve it and failed. That hurts. But what about the dreams I already achieved? What about the dreams YOU already achieved? ...

In the part 5 of my blog series “The Secret to Never Ending Happiness”, I had ended by saying that most of the people don’t even know what are the factors that affect their state of mind. We can identify those factors by self evaluation or introspection. That is precisely what we are going to discuss in today’s blog. So what is introspection? I would define introspection as thinking deeply about your own thoughts, ideas and feelings and examining them. Although the definition of introspection is accurate, but it does not help. It is not an easy process and the definition itself is not helpful to cultivate its habit. Now you would ask why bother to introspect? There are tons of advantages of introspection. It helps you boost self-awareness, improve your decision making, enhances your mental wellbeing, sparks personal growth, I could go on and on about this. So let’s delve into this extremely important and underrated topic with a few examples. ...

Nepotism is a very hot topic for people to throw hate towards these days. But in today’s blog I will prove it to you, that knowingly or unknowingly, we all perform actions and behave in ways which are nepotistic. Let’s start from the basics. What is nepotism? Nepotism is basically an unfair advantage that a person gets because he/she knows someone who can help him/her achieve something he/she wants relatively easily. There are countless examples of nepotism everywhere around you, employees of a company, owners of a business, actors in the film industry, college and school admissions via management quota, etc. On the face of it, it seems very unfair to take away opportunity from people deserving it and giving it to someone who was just lucky to be in the right place and the right time. ...

This is the part 3 of the “You are a hypocrite!” series. In part 1, we understood that every person is a hypocrite. In part 2, we got a bit of insight about the irrational and rational part of our mind. In this part, let’s explore a beautiful way of controlling your mind and using it to your own advantage. I was reading this beautiful book recently called Energize Your Mind by Gaur Gopal Das. The book covers a wide range of topics, including stress management, overcoming negative thoughts, building positive habits, and finding meaning and purpose in life. There is a chapter in the book titled ‘Joshua slips away’. I really love the way an analogy is established between our mind and a child. To summarize that chapter, it is about an experience of Gaur Gopal Das ji at the London airport where a really young child named Joshua is lost and his family is completely panicked and they are unable to find the child and everyone present there is searching for the child. Later they find that the child playing near the fountain. So Gaur Gopal Das ji say that, our mind is also like Joshua. Do check out the book if you want to read what he said in detail. In this blog, I will give you my own interpretation of this. ...

This is the part 2 of the “You are a hypocrite!” series. In part 1, we understood that every person is a hypocrite when it comes to matters that affect their own self. Their behavior in both the cases are very different. In this part, let’s explore why that happens. Let’s consider a scenario where you are watching the iPhone 15 advertisement and your salary is 25000 INR a month, you have just received your 1st salary and you are 22 years old. The following goes through your mind: Wow!! Just look at these iPhone camera samples! They look beautiful! How much does it cost? (You go to amazon and check the current price, it shows 1,00,000 80,000). Oh wow! 20,000 INR discount! Sweet. This is totally worth the money! But my salary is just 25000. How will I afford this😞? Wait a minute! EMI! Let me check how much is the EMI! 13333 INR for 6 months no cost EMI! This is a nice offer. But is it a good purchase? It gives me such good photos, videos and performance, but is it really worth the price? I can’t really afford an iPhone. Yes obviously it is worth the price! Along with all those features, it gives me something to flaunt. After all, iPhones are associated with status in India. How would it look like when all my friends are using an iPhone and I am the only one stuck with an android phone? Although I can’t afford the iPhone fully, but I will easily be able to afford the EMI. And anyways no cost EMI is a good thing right? I am not paying any extra charge for it. Okay I have decided to buy it. ...

All humans are hypocrites; the biggest hypocrite of all is the one who claims to detest hypocrisy. – Peter Wastholm Scene: You are in the office and you see 2 colleagues and your manager talking and laughing at something. “What would they be talking about? Is it about me? Are they talking about the fumble I had in the presentation? OMG yes they are talking about it. Let me get closer to them so I can listen.” (Heart rates rising). “Oh mannnn! I still can’t hear anything.” (The 3 people keep laughing and the go off to their desks and continue their work). “F**k man, it better be something unrelated. But what if it isn’t? December is approaching. What if my manager gives a bad feedback about me. What if I don’t get promoted this year? Does he have a grudge on me? Oh God I am screwed.” One of the 3 people who were discussing earlier comes to you and asks, “Hey you saw that client’s face when you were presenting? That was so funny, we were discussing about that, I was trying so hard not to laugh!”. You heave a sigh, “Oh yeah, that was so funny!”. ...

This is the 5th part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1, part 2, part 3 and part 4 and then come back here. Now without further ado, let’s get into it straightaway. The above diagram is a representation of everything that we have learnt in the first 4 blogs. The fp boxes represent the factors in life that affect the state of mind positively and the fn boxes represent the negatively affecting factors. All of these factors are different for different people. The y-axis in the diagram represents a spectrum of emotions we experience. Each factor is placed based on how it affects the state of mind in the absence of other factors. Think of all the arrows that go from the mind to the factors like the factors are pulling the mind towards the emotion they are in. The labellings wp1…wpn and wn1…wnn are the weights or kind of the force by which these factors pull the mind to their emotion. These weights are variable. All these factors are everything we have ever experienced in life. Every little and every large thing. These factors contain all our fears, all our abilities, all our success, all our failures, all our biases and everything you can possibly think of. It includes small annoying things like your barber spoiling your hairstyle, small happiness like the food being tasty, extreme happiness like becoming a parent for the first time. The diagram here is a very simplified version of what I am trying to explain and not all emotions are covered here but you get the point. Our state of mind at any point in time is determined by a weighted average of all these factors. ...

This is the 4th part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1, part 2 and part 3 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the the biggest pleasures you experience in life. Let’s take an example of arguably the biggest happiness a person experiences in their whole lifetime, the birth of their child. Now you would say how would the state of mind affect the person’s ability to be happy in a scenario like that. There is no way a person can’t be happy on the birth of their child. ...

This is the 3rd part in my series, The Secret to Never Ending Happiness. If you are here for the first time, please make sure to check out the part 1 and part 2 and then come back here. Let’s continue the discussion as promised, let’s talk about the really small pleasures that you experience in life. For some time, let’s forget the placebo effect and focus on the state of mind. Let’s consider a situation where you are eating your favourite chocolate. It is a delightful experience, you are enjoying the chocolate. Is this a happiness? Yes. Would you say this kind of happiness has nothing to do with the state of mind? The type of happiness we talked about earlier was naturally very easy to relate with the state of mind, but this one is a bit difficult. You would say who thinks so much while eating a chocolate. We eat it, we enjoy it, and we forget about it. And yes, you are absolutely correct. But within the next few minutes, I will prove it to you that it is the state of mind and nothing else in this situation as well that makes you feel happy. ...