Being Happy

This book is an attempt at those questions. It asks a few fundamental ones of its own and works out, through the answers, what happiness is, how a person stays in it and what merely resembles it. A great deal has been written on happiness. Very little has been written on sorrow. Less still on sorrow in a country like this one, where memory and feeling carry the weight that elsewhere is carried by institutions. India is holding several generations at once. This book is about the relations between them and about the particular turmoil of a generation that has been taught to want everything at once. That generation will have to learn the discipline of the pause: how to win the race of life while refusing to run it at the advertised speed.