Abhinav Singh's Blog

In my last blog I promised you the truth about happiness. The truth that shall set you free. The truth that if you accept happiness as an attainable state of mind, you’ll move forward towards greatness. Seems counterintuitive doesn’t it? 

I would like you to close your eyes and retrospect on your lives or the lives of people around you like a movie reel. Let’s start from the bare beginnings of a human life.

The very act of being born isn’t happy at the first place. The fear of a failed delivery, or the danger of life on the mother and the child, mixed with the pain of birth. I have seen and been among the ones who have faced it and trust me, it’s no happy place. 

Common folk like us, try make it look happy with the extensive facade that we go through. Relatives come bearing gifts. The ladies of  the house tirelessly singing and dancing to the folk music. It ends in a few days though and real life sets in. 

The initiation into parenthood is filled with months of sleepless nights, nervous breakdowns and hormonal outbursts. Quite a lot of couples never recover from it. Ever heard these words?  – love is labour lost. 

The childhood itself is in no happy place either. Contrary to what most of us think, there is a struggle to fight helplessness, struggle to walk, struggle to learn the new world. Do you remember a happy child on the first day of school? How many of us remember a three year old enjoying his first letter writing experience? Exceptions exist, but we all know the answer to the majority of cases. 

Let’s fast forward the movie reel a decade. How many happy teenagers have we actually seen? They want to experience life, be among friends, fall in love and almost always end up choosing books or careers. And if they don’t, there is another kind of sadness in store lurking over the sidelines. We are all living in an age of population explosion and the sad part is that our teens will never have equal opportunities. 

And when they have won that opportunity, a dream job or a flourishing business, the hard part is to keep it sustained. It’s their purpose to fly and never look back. That’s how the world goes. 

Nonethelessin all human beings, and animals, there is an inherent strength to bring a new life into this world, raise it to an age and let it go when it wants to fly away. Most of the old and retired folks look at their kids with a sense of personal achievement and pride, despite of the sadness that they will never come back to them. At least not in the way they used to when they were little. 

I’m not painting a glim picture of life, showing you the reel, as most of you would suspect. All I’m trying to argue is that the best things in our lives are born of unhappiness or pain including our children. 

The greater amount of pain we endured to complete a certain set of actions, sorting every little problem that came in the way, the more beautiful was the outcome. It may be a more exceptional task like creating breathtaking music or a more common one like raising your kids. 

I can tell you this by an experience of fourteen years. I have taught physics to high school students, preparing them for the toughest engineering examinations in India. Any student who falls in love with the pain of solving a difficult problem, is bound to succeed. 

It is strange to observe the psychology behind this. How can a sixteen year old live with the daily grind of being challenged by mathematics and science? How can anyone make that grind a part of their routine? Well most of them can’t. And the ones who do, make a future for themselves. Accepting unhappiness to achieve greatness. 

Each one of us is like Harry Porter and each one of us have our version of lord Voldemort. We must remember that Harry, no matter fictional, will always be remembered as the boy who brought down one of the most powerful wizards of all times. 

He won’t be remembered for his friends, or that he loved and married Ginny Weasley, or had a kid who also went to Hogwarts. 

My point, you’ll  always be remembered for the problems that you solved in your life. It won’t matter if those problems were slapped on your face or you chose to take them up. All that matters is that you weren’t happy with those problems, so much so, that you rose up to fight them back and created a solution. 

If someone wasn’t unhappy about walking the miles, or carrying load on elephants we wouldn’t have wheels. If someone wasn’t unhappy at the speed of transportation, we wouldn’t have automobiles. 

If someone wasn’t unhappy with blackberries, that were the height of human craving, two decades back we wouldn’t have touch screens. 

If I was happy with my job and the bliss of my married life, the two books would have never been born out of the consequence. An insignificant achievement in the larger scheme of things, but an achievement nonetheless. 

It is the sadness, the pain or the dissatisfaction that drives us, that motivates us. Without them we are like that baby girl Vedna. 

Some would argue that sadness or pain leads to mental sickness and I would agree with them on a larger part. My logic is simple though. Sadness is as a non quantifiable thing, but a thing nonetheless. Just like salt and sugar. It’s good as long as you consume it. When it starts to consume you, there is a place reserved for you in a cardiac care unit. 

I may discuss in a different blog as to how we turn our sadness and pain into a formidable force that is creative and not a  weakness that is destructive, but I haven’t made up my mind on it just yet. 

Let me tell you two stories and then ask what you find in them. 

A young man, an electrical engineer, with bright prospects in industry gives everything up for a purpose – to rescue kids from child labour. Then starts the grind of finding kids who are being forcefully employed in various industries, like the firecrackers industry or the circus industry. He has to fight with everything from the attitude of corrupt officials to the attacks from child employers. It is always a problem to rehabilitate the rescued children. Well, because the money is limited. 

On a rescue mission in 2004, he and his team get brutally attacked by the circus mafia and that is not even the worst part. The local government officials file a report blaming him and his team for the ruckus. One of his team mates is killed in a similar incident elsewhere. His life is a daily grind of pain and sadness, sometimes even fear. 

But when we look back, the man is responsible for rescuing 90,000 kids from slavery and a Nobel Peace prize for his years of service in 2014. Yes, we are talking about Kailash Satyarthi. 

Now comes my question. I don’t know that man in person but what is it,  you think, that drives him? Happiness or unhappiness. 

And here is the second story.

I know of a young Australian actor, music video director who gets a role in a big budget Hollywood movie. The role is cliched and this time he decided to do things differently. He wants to portray the antagonist is a way that has never been done before. He locks himself in a room for months, to get in the skin of the character. Allegedly he even experimented with drugs. In the end, the character becomes him and he becomes the character. We all know what was the outcome if we have watched Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight. 

Cristian Bale or anybody in that movie, barely managed to match up to what Heath had to offer. The character of the Joker becomes and overnight sensation. People forget the old incarnations of the same character played by the bigwigs like Jack Nicholson. 

The story does end here though. It’s us said that the Joker never leaves Heath and he dies of an overdose before he could receive his academy award. 

Many people might argue that there were ways he could have lived a fuller life. I have a different view though. 

We all die, but Heath created an unforgettable phenomenon. Something that was so hateful, so ugly, a pure evil that it costed him his life and yet so beautiful. 

What do you see? Sadness or greatness? Because I see both of them as twin sisters walking hand in hand. 

The seeds of this blog were planted in my head when I first saw the movie – In Pursuit of Happyness, starring Will Smith. This is not a review blog, but there was something about the movie that created an uneasy feeling in my stomach that went on for years. It was two things actually.

First how does that movie anywhere relate to happiness? Is there one moment of happiness in tie movie except the place where it ends? And second, how did this movie become a blockbuster hit, racing in the charts and get ranked 8 out of 10 on IMDB? 

Please don’t get me wrong, I loved the movie and it is a fantastic screenplay. My line of inquiry is along human nature. We as humans are all in pursuit of happiness and we all conform to it as a reality. I have never met a sane person who would dare say that he is looking for sadness or pain or failure. 

So If we are all in the same persuit, then why are we attracted to the movies, or characters or books that so wonderfully depict pain? 

This holds true even for comedy. The greatest comedians ever born – Charlie Chaplain, always  depicted in his silent screenplays the pain of joblessness and post war depression in the United States. Coming to the late nineties sitcom – Friends. Yes we all love Friends. There is the pain of estranged relationship between Ross and Rachel that kept the sitcom going season after season. 

Coming to books we know that Harry Potter never finds ever lasting happiness in the series. There were his moments with his friends, of course, but those moments don’t make a major contribution to the story. Do they? 

The story of Harry Potter  is a sad reflection on our lives. The story is interesting as long as there is pain, fear, danger, sadness or failure. The story ends when the protagonist finds happiness. 

So here is my question. Is something wrong with us? Seeking happiness in our personal lives and appreciating the pain in others’. It may seem like a norm, but I’m writing this blog to question the norm and explore the possibilities within us. 

Let me put forth the question in a different way. If we seek happiness always, then why are we invested in billion of dollars – movies, books, psychotherapy, new age gurus and drugs  that are selling pain pills wrapped up in a sugary coating of happiness? The internet is overflowing with self help videos of some next door loser who fought and fought through his limited means or disability to seek happiness. Is happiness that difficult to attain that it takes a lifetime of adventure and grind to find it? And if it does, then what’s the point? 

Coming back to my personal life and I know that you can correlate with it because I’m your next door regular Joe. There was a time when I thought that getting a job or making good money would be the high point and I did that. 

Then came the pursuit of a life partner.  Done. 

The ultimate low point came into my life when I started writing fiction just to find a few hours of solace from my good job and my great marriage. The characters in my book gave me more happiness than I could have got from any living person. I hope that my wife doesn’t read it, but yes it’s true. 

That was short lived too, because the book had to end some day. And then came the hard part – editing, cover design and selling the book. I was unhappy again. 

And that got me thinking – would I ever find happiness? Ever? 

This moment of epiphany led me down a path that we can all relate to. Self help books, life coaches and new age gurus. The worst were the health and yoga  specialists. They started teaching me a hundred different ways to breathe. Like I didn’t already know how to. 

I also took keen interest in the lives of those supper successful people like movie stars, CEO’s and others only to find that most of them were on doses of yoga, psychotherapy or alcohol and narcotics. I’m not judging the modes they were seeking to find happiness. Just trying to make a point that each one of them needed something as a support system. 

The list of support systems doesn’t end there. The best one is yet to be listed – Religion. For Americans, Richard Gere is the most famous Buddhist after Dalai Lama. Julia Roberts and Will Smith to Hinduism and Tom Cruise to Scientology. The list is very long, but can it be that these people found happiness after tagging themselves to a faith? And if that is so then why do we have   brazen accounts of failed marriages, substance abuse and sloppy lifestyles? 

From the most underdeveloped third world countries, where people have to walk miles for drinking water to the most developed nations like the USA where there are dozens of flavours of cheese and cereals in a supermarket. Unhappiness is on the rise. How do we know? 

Just look at the consumption of antidepressants in any developed nation. 

Hence comes the billion dollar question. Why are we always unhappy? Is this a problem? A disease? And why is everyone suffering from it? Fake Facebook and Instagram profiles aside, have we ever met real people who are truly happy? 

The answer was revealed to me in the strangest of ways. It was a June evening when I had to accompany a friend to his relatives’ place. It was some legal matter that I didn’t care to focus upon and hence I don’t remember. 

What I distinctly remember is a little girl, about five. Both of her hands covered in thick bandages, her face with signs of multiple injuries. Maybe a broken tooth and blood coagulation at the base of her nose. The last one was fresh and made her look like a little fighter who had just come victorious out of a violent match.  A clear case of child abuse.  I wondered who could do that to a kid?

What surprised me even more that friend didn’t seem alarmed at the child’s injuries, rather they were talking casually. He gave the child some chocolates which she smiled and took. I came to know from their conversation that her name was Vedna. What a strange name? It means pain. 

Somewhere in the middle of his conversation, my friend looked back at me, He must have seen the horror and intrigue on my face. 

“Go and fetch your Papa,” he said to the girl and came to sit by my side. 

“What happened to her?” I asked. 

“She can’t feel pain..” my friend replied with a sigh. “All those injuries, she did it to herself… We are lucky that she is even alive…. The thick bandages on her hand are there to prevent her from hurting herself.” 

It was a long discussion, but the above three lines should summarise it well. She had a rare condition called as Congenital Analgesia. Vedna treated her body parts like her toys. A ruptured nose if she was angry, a broken tooth if something was sticking in between. She was almost about to gouge her eyes just out of curiosity. 

When asked why, she said that she wanted to turn her vision inwards to see what was wrong with her. A noble thought, that could have devastating consequences. It was hard for any one in the family to fathom the magnitude of her problem in the first place. Pain comes so naturally to us that we know that something is wrong with Vedna. 

Could the same thing be true for happiness and sadness? Maybe I was looking in the wrong direction. I would chose to talk to a man of science over a thousand philosophers on any day. The secrets to happiness must lie within the realms of neuroscience. 

A few months of wait led me to a neurosurgeon. 

“I can operate on your frontal lobe. That would make you happy, but you won’t be very much alive,” he told me after a long and spirited discussion.  I also came to know about some cutting edge research about electrodes being surgically inserted into the brain to activate happiness. But how is that any different than a joint in between my lips? 

Working my way through gurus, doctors, pills scientific papers and Blogs , I realised that there is no way to an ever lasting happiness. At least none that we know for sure or have seen real people  around us finding it.  

You may think that this is a bad thing or a waste of your time, and keep on going to the next business  that is selling you happiness. The facts are too compelling to ignore. And I would like to exemplify. 

If you are unhealthy, you are unhappy. Once you have hit the gym, gotten your diet in order and endured the pain, you health gets better and you find yourself happier. But that isn’t permanent and there is something else that will make you unhappy. The cycle never ends. 

The seeds of the greatest achievements in your life will be founded in the acceptance of a simple truth that happiness is an unattainable state of mind. 

How? Read the next blog to know. 

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Consider the following short story 

‘… Vikram Gangwar was a rich spoilt brat free loading on his father’s money. His infatuation with cars and bikes began soon as he hit puberty. His mother died when he was  six and his father had no time time to spare from his political meetings and rallies. All that Vikram was left with, was the collection of Bentleys, Ferraris and  Harleys in his dad’s garage. 

The only reason that Vikram ever went to college, was Sonali. The girl who he met in the second year of political science and they fell in love. 

Dev Singh Gangwar – Vikram’s dad was a good hearted man. He knew that the only way to keep Vikram’s wasteful ways in check and and further his political ambitions was to marry him to a good middle class girl from a different caste. He got the lovebirds married, just after Vikram failed his seventh semester exams.’      ————— The End. 

Now I know that there are many important flaws with this story, but I want you to think the  most fundamental flaw that ruins an otherwise good character description of Vikram. 

I really want you to think and write it on a paper..

I

I

I

Think.. harder. 

I

I

I

Okay let’s discuss. The most important flaw of all (and I’d be a bit theatrical here) stems from a very fundamental question that I  happened to come across in my favourite Netflix series – Lucifer.. 

Did you guess the question yet? 

Okay enough games. Lucifer Morningstar, the king of hell, looks into the eyes of every murder suspect and asks one question, each time, every time – “What is it that you really desire?” 

Yes folks! The most important ingredient that is missing in Vikram’s  story is – BURNING DESIRE . I’m sorry I had to bold and capitalise every letter, but it is that important. Let’s analyse.

The story doesn’t show us the risks that Vikram can take for his love or the sacrifices he can make. Even the girl, Sonali, has no desire but to marry Vikram and above everything else, the Dad has found the best possible solution. Everyone is happy. And that is the problem, because the reader is unhappy. 

We have come across one of the most important fallacies of the human psyche. We want our lives to be like Vikram Gangwar, but we love to taste some spice, some struggle or a conflict in others’ lives. And that’s what creates an interesting story. 

Allow me to put the same perspective in different words. Almost every one of us has read and appreciated Harry Porter, but most of us would give up or commit suicide if we had to actually live his life ( hypothetically speaking). 

People love to read about a protagonist who can put himself into danger for his love or is ready to humiliate himself for his beloved, in front of hundreds of people …. why? Just because most of us can’t do that. 

So let’s talk about ways on how we can make Vikram’s story better. 

The first one would be a typical 90’s Bollywood that the Dad is the evil one and he would do unspeakable things to destroy their relationship. There is a conflict of desires. But that is too old school. 

The second could be that Vikram has a twisted mind and a habit of getting everything that he wants so much so that he can cause harm to the girl, Sonali. That would make him an antagonist and Sonali has a strong desire of her own. Maybe another boy or a career and that that would lead to a conflict. Still, this idea has been tried and tested in many a mainstream novels and movies. 

We can go a step ahead and can give the girl, Sonali, a burning desire for money or power or revenge against Vikram ( he may have cause harm to someone with his reckless life – someone close to Sonali). That would make her the antagonist. 

We must understand that a story is all about the conflict of desires. 

A lot of times the conflict may not be created by an antagonist but by the situations themselves. 

Consider a situation in which the protagonist has to diffuse a bomb and he needs a safety pin, or something similar, to do that. Now the bomb many be the villain’s doing, but getting the safety pin against the ticking clock, that is nowhere to be found, is a scene that would make the reader sit up. 

It’s not that the tension can be build in thriller, action or horror stories only. We can do it in love stories too. A protagonist trying to propose to his woman and an unfortunate event ruins the proposal every time, is a tested method to create tension in love stories. Or a protagonist trying to express his emotion in front of hundreds of people staring at him.

We must remember two things. Every character, must have a strong desire for something. And the conflict of desires leads to an unforgettable story. 

I can tell you by experience that Mark Twain was playing with sarcasm when he wrote these words and writing is the loneliest and the most difficult of all crafts. But there is a secret.

An author is in a world of drama, romance and thrill as his characters are racing against time. While the people closest to him think that he is all alone and struggling with nothingness. Writing is a craft that takes years and hundreds of thousands of words to master. That being done, the writers still struggle to create the next story that would send the reader into a world of bliss and create those unforgettable characters that become a part of their lives.

This page is all about the mistakes I made and my struggle to understand this craft. Four years and two million words down the line, I still find it hard to say that I’m a master.

But as the saying goes – Those who cant do…. teach…

This page isn’t about shortcuts to sell million copies of your book. In my experience I found them too good to be true. If you are looking for something similar, I suggest that you don’t scroll down further.

This page is not even intended to make you a master of the craft, because that takes practice, practice and even more practice. My blogs are all about basics that can help you clear level zero, and level one…maybe level two. A helping hand to make you grow a bit, in the pursuit of creating a bestseller.

So. Happy writing folks.

Read the line below and try to experience how it sounds?

“…. Rohit is tall fellow, six foot four. Very lean, so much so that he appears
sickly with those sunken eyes and darkened skin below the eyelids….”

It is a description of a character. The description is apt and we would know
more about this person as the lines progress. But there is a problem.
Like any tall, lean and sickly person that might have crossed us in a busy
street, he sparks no interest. Maybe you would turn your head once, to see
him. And that too in a country like in India where a height of six foot four isn’t
that common. But that is all.
You won’t be interested in knowing more about him. What kind of life he
lives? Where his home is? And who are his friends?
You would rather go your way. There are bigger problems in your life than
getting to know a tall, sickly person.
Let’s look at another description, a rather similar one.

“… I met Rohit at the football tryouts last December. He stood right beside
me as the coach was taking roll calls. I could hardly reach his shoulders.
When he ran, his legs could fathom in a single stride as mine did in four.
With those legs sticking out of his red boxers, we could as well use him to
scare away birds in a farm. There was just one problem though. He hardly
ran after the ball, got exhausted easily and just stood there, mid field, looking
lost and weary. That’s how he got his name – Scarecrow…”

Now this is what we call characterization by action. The reader may be
interested to know why this Rohit is always exhausted? Why is he tired and
lost? And why above all that, he has come to football tryouts?
There is also an element of tension in the description. Will he be able to
make it? It’s for sure that his peers won’t go easy on him.
The reader wants to know further.

Let’s read another character description.
“… I tried asking her what went wrong, but her large blue eyes kept staring a
the wall behind me, and she kept sipping on her coffee. No matter how hard I
tried, she wouldn’t look at me….”
There is something wrong with a character who avoids eye contact. The
reader would be interested to know. And along the way, we also described
the blue eyes.

We don’t always need the hair or the eyes or the build to describe a
character. The characters can have physiological traits, some eccentricities.
Your next door neighbor, who says – hello, every time your paths cross.
Who never create a ruckus, looks after himself and his family and does
everything by the book, isn’t a character worth reading. But he becomes
interesting as soon as you notice blood marks on his pants, every second
Tuesday of a month, or he goes out of the house every night at three.
Eccentricities are important for any character to become worth reading.

“… There was something with him and his sunglasses. He even wore them at
nights, no matter how may people made fun of him….”
This character has a thing for sunglasses. He doesn’t give up even when
people are making fun of him. The reader wants to know more.

“Don’t worry the drug won’t kill you. If I wanted you dead, a bullet was
enough,” She said, supporting her overgrown belly with her left hand.
What do you think the above lines tell you about the character? A really
dangerous or a headstrong woman. Adding to that she is pregnant. A
strange combination of bullets and pregnancy. Generally they don’t mix.

There are so many traits to explore and so many ways to pen them down,
but we tend to stick to physical features… Why? Let’s look at another one.
“… She took so much time to dress up that my fingernails could grow an
inch…”
This is called as exaggeration. Consider another one like this.

“I would never dare, even in my worst of dreams, to cross paths with Amit.
That boy had a superpower. He could send any person into coma, just by
talking to him. He talked with my dog for an hour, for crying out loud. The
poor soul had to be taken to the vet, five times last month…”

And then there is characterization by contrast. Read the following lines.

“I had no problem with my flab growing everywhere, but I went to jog just to
see her everyday. I had no courage to speak to her face, so I used to watch
her from a distance. Her hair flowing with the wind as she ran, the brown
eyes, everything about her was goddess like. That day I managed the
courage to speak and followed Zisha, to her favorite bench behind the
hedges. I was a couple of meters to her left when I saw. Her index finger,
deep into her nose, searching for stuff.
That’s when our eyes met and she stared at me so hard, that I turned around
and never cared to look back….”

The first part characterizes a beautiful woman and the second part a nose
digger. An eccentric behavior that creates interest in mind of the reader.

Characterization hack one-o-one –
Physical attributes are important, but there is more to a character than just
the body. Talk to your character, love him, support him, hate him, fight with him
and see how he behaves.