Khush Raho na Bhiya!

A storyteller, a booklet crime, and my lifelong side quest called happiness

Happiness, Image Source: Unsplash

Your free ticket to finding Khushiyan ✨

Welcome back to this little corner of the internet where I attend events hoping to return enlightened, but somehow come back carrying an identity crisis, three new hobbies, and seventeen unanswered questions.

Today’s topic is khushiyan.

For my non-Hindi readers, khushiyan simply means happiness. At least that’s what the dictionary claims. My brain, however, believes happiness is a much stranger creature.

Sometimes it looks like your favourite song appearing on shuffle at exactly the right moment. Sometimes it is discovering forgotten money in your jeans pocket. Sometimes it is receiving a “Meeting Cancelled” notification and feeling your soul briefly leave your body in celebration.

Happiness Apparently Doesn’t Have a Leaderboard

Khushiyan, Image by Author

Recently, I attended a storytelling session called Khushiyan by Laksh Maheshwari, who introduced himself as a Story Archaeologist. That title alone deserves an award because it sounds infinitely cooler than most LinkedIn designations.

I arrived expecting stories about happiness. I left carrying several questions, a few insights, and further evidence that my brain and simplicity are not on speaking terms.

At one point during the event, Laksh asked us to close our eyes and think about the happiest moment of our lives.

And I got stuck.

Not because I don’t have happy memories.

Because I seem to have collected too many of them.

A solo trip. A concert. Finishing a good book. Watching rain from a window. Laughing so hard with friends that breathing briefly becomes optional. Discovering a song that understands my mood better than I do.

None of them feels important enough to defeat all the others and claim first place. They simply exist together, like tiny stars scattered across different parts of the sky. Some shine brighter on certain days, but none of them erase the others.

That realization felt strangely comforting.

Maybe happiness isn’t a competition. Maybe it doesn’t need a winner.

Questions That Arrived Uninvited

There was also a quest during the event: to discover five keys to the doors of khushiyan that stand right in front of us.

Apparently, many of us keep knocking on those doors while the keys are already in our pockets. Rather like forgetting to pick up the keys and unintentionally locking myself outside my home. Or like forgetting to pick up my bag, thinking, anyhow I will be coming to office tomorrow, so no harm, and then realizing near home, while sitting in the cab, that the keys are in the BAG.

A tragic tale for another day, hehe.

We searched for those keys through stories, conversations, and questions. By the end of it, everyone seemed to have found a few answers.

I, meanwhile, returned home carrying a fresh bubble of confusion.

And then, naturally, my overthinking department reported for duty.

If being kind and selfless automatically guarantees happiness, why aren’t our mothers the happiest people alive? At least in my universe, I haven’t met anyone more generous than my mother.

And since it was Father’s Day, another question arrived.

Why do fathers forget that they are people too? Why do so many dads spend decades wearing invisible armour, eventually becoming emotionless beings who create turbulence while calling it protection?

And why are we, a generation capable of forgetting why we opened the fridge, somehow unable to forget embarrassing moments from years ago? Why do we take years to let go of hurt, guilt, and yearning?

Human beings are curious creatures. Sometimes wonderfully so, sometimes frustratingly so, and occasionally contradictory enough to make happiness seem like a puzzle designed by someone who misplaced the instruction manual.

Other Unexpected Sources of Joy

The more I thought about it, the more I realized that happiness doesn’t seem to have a preferred format.

Sometimes it arrives through music.

One evening, work felt exhausting, conversations felt exhausting, and even yawning seemed to require effort. To be fair, my system was operating on barely two hours of sleep.

Then my friends planned a dinner followed by an after-party. By three in the morning, my brain had downgraded itself into customer support mode.

“Please sleep.” “Friends are important.” “Language not able to process.”

They had switched to Tamil. A beautiful language, unfortunately incompatible with my current operating system.

“System error.”

Then someone played music.

Suddenly, every sleeping brain cell woke up as though it had received an inspirational TED Talk directly into the bloodstream. We spent an hour listening to songs and another two hours talking.

That is probably why I love music so much.

Songs have rescued me from boredom, sadness, awkward silences, questionable decisions, and sleep deprivation. They are essentially my emotional inverter, quietly taking life’s power cuts and turning the lights back on.

But happiness also appears in much stranger forms.

A few days ago, a friend and I discovered that rajma and channa had accidentally been mixed together. Instead of abandoning lunch plans, we found ourselves at one in the morning separating beans while discussing dreams, regrets, office gossip, and an impressive amount of nonsense.

Forty minutes later, our mission was complete.

Naturally, my mastikhor brain suggested using the beans as a doodling medium, and within minutes we were creating tiny masterpieces out of legumes.

Cup of Chai, Image by Author

An alien with dome helmet, Image by Author

Because apparently, sleep is optional when pulses decide to pursue a career in art.

And somehow, that entire ridiculous episode felt happier than many carefully planned outings.

Born Prematurely, Living Prematurely

The event also gifted everyone a booklet, accompanied by strict instructions not to peek inside before the right moment.

Apparently, God forgot to pass that instruction along to me.

So when the speaker asked people to raise their hands if they had already sneaked a look, I proudly confessed alongside four or five fellow rule-benders.

He laughed and said,

“You all must have been eight-month babies.”

Tiny correction.

I was actually a seven-month baby.

At this point, I am convinced haste circulates through my veins. Even my mother regularly asks, “Why are you always in such a hurry?”

Honestly, I have no answer.

Maybe God forgot to include an instruction manual before dispatching me to Earth. Or perhaps the celestial employee responsible for distributing humans skipped an important line:

Please wait for further instructions before opening the chaos.

Curiosity has occupied the penthouse suite of my brain for twenty-six years now. It doesn’t pay rent, ignores society rules, and keeps opening sealed envelopes labelled “For later.”

Hehehe.

God Said, “Not for You”

After the event, we were asked to scan a QR code for a surprise. The surprise turned out to be a collection of more than ten thousand tiny ideas for happiness, little moments designed to make ordinary days feel brighter.

Naturally, I tried joining the group.

Naturally, the universe disagreed.

“Group quota full. Sorry, you can’t join.”

At this point, I am fairly convinced that God and technology occasionally collaborate just to keep me entertained.

Maybe I wasn’t supposed to borrow ten thousand ideas from strangers. Maybe I was meant to continue collecting my own.

Coincidentally, the very first article on this page was about finding joy in life’s little moments. So perhaps someone up there simply nudged me and whispered,

“No shortcuts. Go make your own collection.”

Honestly, that sounds believable.

After all, they already performed an emergency landing by sending me into the world two months early. They also made sure my brain operates at maximum occupancy.

It never really rests.

It keeps looking for new hobbies and fresh adventures.

The moment boredom appears, it starts throwing suggestions at me.

“Let’s doodle.” “Let’s read.” “Let’s write.” “Let’s learn poetry.” “Let’s sing.” “Let’s dance.” “Let’s watch an entire season of something we absolutely don’t have time for.”

God gave me a hundred side quests but forgot to provide enough skill points to master a single one.

But perhaps that isn’t a terrible bargain.

I may never become exceptional at one thing, yet I get to experience many things. I get to enjoy multiple worlds instead of living inside just one.

Maybe life was never meant to be a race toward expertise.

Maybe it is more like an open-world game where you wander, collect stories, unlock unexpected hobbies, and accidentally create a whole self-made joy for yourself.

And somewhere along the way, without even noticing, you become happy.

So What Exactly Are Khushiyan?

I still don’t know.

Perhaps khushiyan are not destinations waiting for us at the end of perfectly planned roadmaps.

Perhaps they are tiny rebellions against ordinary days.

They are laughing with a friend as though you’ve become intoxicated by existence itself.

They are discovering that the treasure was sitting right in front of you all along while you kept tripping over it and forgetting to open the box.

Maybe they are also a consequence of belonging to a generation that can discuss emotional intelligence, revive decade-old songs, heal inner children, create memes out of existential dread, and somehow be wonderfully absurd and surprisingly mature at the same time.

Yes, I am a proud Gen-Z representative.

Maybe khushiyan are simply attending an event hosted by artists you admire, listening to stories, returning home with seventeen unanswered questions, and then writing an entire article just to thank incredible people for existing in the same timeline as you.

But perhaps not knowing is part of the deal.

After all, if we understood happiness completely, what excuse would my brain have for collecting seventeen new questions every weekend?

Hehehe.

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