An Insight into Happiness
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oh
yes my name is mohan i passed out from
this campus about
a little more than 20 years ago 21 or so
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i left from february 1999 uh i joined a
competitor with the mentor for a while
with conversation after that
you guys know that if you didn’t know
that before then just been introduced
but as a normal musician so people ask
me who i am
the world musician will probably be the
first or second quarter i’ll say
and if people ask me how i am i’ll
typically say i’m happy
but i’m usually happy i don’t
have a problem being happy i remember uh
it’s very later people ask you right
typically if you have a sad face someone
who
knows you like so someone who doesn’t
even know you for that matter
might come and ask you why you said is
everything all right and they might try
and
uh make things fair for you if you’re
happy and generally happy
we generally don’t really know why we’re
happy we just are
and that’s our way so that was the key
as a kid
uh except for one time when my parents
decided to take my sister and iphone
holiday this was when i was
eight i think my sister was 11. and my
parents decided the best holiday
best holiday 17 temples
in an ambassador so it was a big image
and my parents didn’t do it because they
wanted to teach us something they did it
because they thought it was a good
holiday
so we still forget about it and as you
can see i’m still bothered by it
but apart from stuff like that generally
you don’t have a problem being happy
you have a problem with rules initially
you’re trying to discover everything
around you
when you’re a baby you’re innocent
everyone’s loving you too much pinching
your cheeks and saying all your baby and
all that
which can get annoying but you don’t
know it yet uh so you find it easy to be
happy
and you discover things around you good
food mother’s love
uh other people’s love some that you
accept from that rejected
most of the time you’re happy then you
stop discovering things around you
because you think that’s something
my parents are talking about you know my
teachers have taught me all you need to
know
i need to discover myself
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you decide to go for parties with your
friends what your parents would allow it
you do all those kind of things which at
that time seemingly
important people to discover yourself as
an individual human being
you want to grow up in one day
but even within that kind of wanting to
grow up and not being allowed to grow up
and you ever realize that being a
student is probably the best thing in
your life
uh you’re so happy in
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i was a general bad student uh before
that i was
i was doing economics i loved it and
my source of happiness was one of my big
sources of happiness was the fact
all was the ambition to do good and if
you love it and if you thought something
would typically end up doing something
good
right so college was okay
uh i was doing basically well here i was
uh i think 84 among 114 students
i don’t
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bloody hell uh made some of the best
friends possible
and a lot more than we just met
and we see the same guys as we were 20
years ago that’s a source of happiness
coming back to what we’re talking about
already
uh oliver from from example that you’ve
seen call me
and ask me do you would you like to come
and talk and this is the theme
and that led me to ask two things
one is what they advise me for all right
so i don’t know
after you come and say go to others
but to speak about happiness some people
really haven’t bothered thinking about
i’ve never thought why i’m happy and i
just found it
easy to be happy now i needed to start
asking questions as to
what reason happens what is the money in
the corporate life
is it the fact that some of you or one
of you
will know the fact that perhaps on the
song somewhere is it
i remember when i first called someone
and heard my voice back and then you
told me
i cannot discuss
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so in my what else or whatever you call
it
i don’t have money i’ll make it one day
the same amount of money or more then i
can make it a year as a cycle
and why that is
i was sure that i could earn money there
but for me it was as much a business
decision as it was
about passion so
when these guys were speaking about it
before that she was most important yes
true to a certain extent
were not all true which brings me to
why am i saying this i was equally happy
when i was arrival
i’m equally happy now if you ask me
today i cannot choose
i cannot tell you that i am so much
happy because someone wrote my song
i did when i was masturbating
about it they told me they were my song
how much price would you
put on that again that is true it’s a
feeling
i’ve said on stage multiple times
the meaning of hearing your song being
sung by people who are listening to you
is more than anything any other
happiness in the world but that’s
because those are
things to say i do feel them but if i
look at it as a comparison i don’t
have a point to compare it with you i
was generally happy as a banker in fact
i was more popular probably
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out
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so i was lucky but again even in those
two years
when i was living of my friends or my
family um
we didn’t know where the next day was
coming from didn’t know
whether the next check was coming from
anyway
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we didn’t search for it we just got it
as a physician i’ve had this outstanding
experience of working with
this group of people from dharavi very
small kids so i like people
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is
i have some idea of what i’m speaking
about not really this
but that’s the way i deal with my life
that’s the way i deal with my music
i think the best songs come to us the
best feelings come to us
i genuinely honestly believe happiness
is an experience
that we just need to experience let’s
eat we don’t
have a specific need i want at least
i i do believe i have a lot of friends
who have the same feeling
that we don’t need to seek happiness it
is in the seeking of happiness
because which is probably this will make
me happier
than i am so
while i was planning the computer
industry after it said yes
without realizing what you have to speak
afterwards
and i saw quite a few videos of people
speaking on that
some of them technologies one videos are
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please watch it it’s a very scientific
psychologist’s view on happiness and
it’s a brilliant study the this is a
selection of studies at least one
and this was published in 2006 one of
the first ever videos to be published
the reason i’m bringing him up is that
he makes a certain distinction where he
says
choice is not good for happiness we
would think it is
that i can choose my future i think
whether to do this or that i could
choose to be a banker or a musician
and therefore i would prefer that that
would be more happiness to have that
choice
he goes on to prove within his talk
after various studies that choice is not
necessarily the best thing
i remember a professor
we have a choice no problem and we do
say that all the time
why don’t we treat happiness the same
way
because we believe that in our ability
to predict what will give us more
happiness
lies our source of happiness we have the
ability to compare
so we compare one happiness versus
another whereas
one happiness would be just as equal as
the other it would be contrasting
choices
it could be choices that can be made
simultaneously in my case
i still had that backup plan that two
years later
if i really couldn’t survive as a
relationship i could go back so for me
one of the biggest life-changing choices
that i made don’t know how to be alright
so i could continue and today
people know my music but if that had
happened
i would come back to writing and try to
make someone in there
come and tell me i love it but
the whole point of this is it was easier
for me to make because both choices were
still going to be available to me in
some way
a couple of years down the line i wasn’t
destroying one choice
we tend to think according to me we tend
to think that i need to be
happier than i am now or i need to be
happier than that
we tend to forget that we don’t know
what causes of happiness
is it when your kids are used to those
the same things that used to derive what
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uh one more example one more extremely
immediately spoken about example is how
money is not a source of happiness
i disagree i would rather be a rich
happy relation than a more happy
physician
anyone would be a happy person rather
than a happy person
why do you say money is not a source of
happiness we tend to want to put across
the point
that if you have unknown just looking at
it isn’t going to make you happy
the whole point of that is to buy
something
if someone is happy looking at their
money in the bank why do we need to stop
that
why do we need to learn after something
that we call permanent happiness
and forget those little transient
happinesses that we did that we don’t
even know came from any specific place
my whole journey as a musician as a
cooperative assistant
as son as a brother etc
is about this
i didn’t think about it now that i’m
thinking about it i probably have come
to realize
that i don’t fight happiness i don’t try
to find it
i’m happy when it happens to me and why
am i i am happy
and if i’m sad i can go out of that when
i need to
or i can move
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both sides you will sing to the song if
you’re happy i make this on my feet
happy
i listen to you sing that song back to
me i’ve been happy
so this is an industry that i’m a part
of which teaches me something very
simple
just like songs come to me one of our
uh
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thank you