Basic Instinct

The pursuit of joy outside of us is as futile as the pursuit of our own shadow. We have to find happiness within ourselves.

- Debashis Chatterjee

Our basic instinct is to be joyful—“to be happy as hell”, my friend Sadanand would remark. “Even hell ought to be a reasonably happy place for you to want to get there,” I humour him.

Sadanand’s colleagues in the office call him Sad Anand: his grim and melancholy eyes behind his thick eyeglasses lend credence to that nickname. He is an accountant by training and a certified penny pincher at work — but spends generously to fly to Australia to do bungee-jumping every year. Imagine the hellish joy he gets in spending a fortune just to be suspended feet up thousands of feet above the sea. I wonder how our instinct for joy can even take us to such limits of our physical endurance