My 2nd TEDx Talk: Why You Will Never Be Happy

The theme at TEDx Burdwan Medical College was "Against The Grain," and the obvious move was to talk about building. Enterprise tech, bootstrapping, ten years of scaling something in India that shouldn't have worked. I have that talk. It writes itself, which is exactly why I didn't want to give it.

So I picked the one subject where I had the most credentials and the least authority.

A decade of building mental health technology. Millions of employees covered, the research, the frameworks, all of it. And still, when my mother asks me every Sunday if I'm actually happy, I say "अच्छा चल रहा है" and change the subject. That gap felt more honest than anything I could say about building companies.

Ghalib got there first, of course.

ये मसाइल-ए-तसव्वुफ़, ये तेरा बयान ग़ालिब
तुझे हम वली समझते, जो न बादा-ख़्वार होता

(These grand explanations of yours, Ghalib... we'd have taken you for a saint, if only you weren't a drunkard.)

Two hundred years and one couplet, and he says the whole thing better than I managed in thirteen minutes. Understanding something completely and living it are in two different rooms, and most of us have furnished only one of them.

Medical students were the right room for this. They spend years learning to turn the human body into a subject, which is what makes them good at the job. I just wanted to ask what happens when they do the same thing to their own happiness.

My first TEDx argued that not every problem needs a solution. This one landed in the same place through a completely different door, and I only noticed that afterwards. Apparently I have been circling one idea for a while without knowing it.