Girish's Blog

 Searching for happiness in an e-commerce website  returns a never-ending series of books with views from businessmen, journalists, lawyers, academics, and monks. Many of them have been #1 bestsellers and then dropped into the long tail of the the cavernous warehouses waiting for someone to rediscover them. People not only want to read about finding happiness, they want to hear about it too - just search for Happiness on Spotify podcasts. The fact that every few months a new tome or podcast appears claiming to have the recipe for happiness, shows that each of the prior trailblazers have only addressed a small portion of the hunt for happiness, It seems that we are blindfolded, in the dark and searching for a object that we have not idea how it looks. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi in his seminal book, Flow: The Psychology of Happiness says:    “I shall argue that the primary reason it is so difficult to achieve happiness centers on the fact that, contrary to the myths mankind has developed to

The Bhagavad Gita, or the Song of the Lord, comprises of 700 verses from the Bhisma Parva section of the Mahabharata, which has around 100,000 verses - 0.7% of the great epic. To choose THE MOST IMPORTANT verses from this is an even tougher task, given that the entire scripture is the advice of Sri Krishna.  The best place to start is Sankara's masterly introduction to the Gita: Having created the cosmos and seeking to ensure its existence, the Lord brought forth in the beginning the Progenitors Marici and the rest. Then he imparted to them the Vedic law of works (pravritti). Later, bringing forth others like Sanaka and Sanandana, He imparted to them the law of cessation of work (nivritti) marked by knowledge and detachment. Indeed, the Vedic law making for the world's stability is two-fold: (i)embracing works )ii) embracing cessation.  This science of the Gita is the quintessence of all that goes under the name of the Vedas, but its sense is difficult to grasp. Many have striv