c u on top - satyabrata dam

    Once in a while, especially when we don’t feel that things are going our way and we are not finding the spark or excitement in our life and somehow, despite our best efforts, happiness eludes us; I feel it is important to look deep within ourselves and ask few pertinent questions. Rather than running out to a therapist or to a friend. Because as I always insist, no one in this world should know you better than your own self. So everything must begin with your own self centered world and self analyzing thoughts.   So ask: why do I do what I do? Can you really answer this question with all honesty and devoid of anything else! Can you be totally honest with your own self where no one else is privy to, no one is going to see you there or judge you. You are the judge and jury and also the defendant and the prosecutor. Much of your life’s state (sad or happy) will depend upon that honest answer to the question: why do I do what I do?   And then once you fin...

  Few weeks ago, while delivering a corporate talk at Zurich, someone from the audience asked me, how can we keep our every day exciting and fresh, since that was one of the key messages of my talk. And I said that there are many ways of doing it, but one very obvious and easy method is to always try do something, every day, that you have never done before. It is obvious because a human brain has developed to such a stage of infinite capacity to assimilate and analyse that we need to keep feeding it with something new to keep it active and satiated. If we don’t feed it something new, be it an experience, ideas, etc then it soon starts getting bored and then we get addicted to things like tiktok or Insta, which offers us instant satiation often without any substance. And it is simple because anything new that we have never done or experienced before doesn’t have to be something challenging or even out of the world. It simply should be something that you, as an individual, have neve...

    Though I often talk about happiness and conduct happiness workshops, I do agree that there are times in all of our lives when the feeling of blue is not only true but perhaps necessary too. Now why do we call this feeling of sadness, being under, etc as blue! My online research threw up lots of different answers to the origin of this expression, yet there wasn’t a single universal consensus to its neonatal source. So, here’s my version, why feeling low is often referred as feeling blue: I am a die-hard romantic (no matter what the women of my life who have passed me by say) and my favourite colour is blue. I associate blue with the abundance of the day lit sky, to the vast bodies of water aka lakes, rivers, oceans, glaciers, all appearing blue as they reflect the azure sky above. I would like to believe, which happens to me too, though rarely do I feel blue, when I feel a bit down under, I walk up into nature, mostly mountains or a mountain lake or waterfall, or a gl...