Live Happily Work Happily (A Window to the Science of Happy Living and Working)

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Happiness has suddenly emerged as a pop subject with the keen interest shown by luminaries like The Dalai Lama, former Indian President APJ Abdul Kalam, economist Amartya Sen, top psychologists including Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, Daniel Goleman and Martin Seligman; and historian Darrin McMahon. Nevertheless, the measure of individual happiness has still remained a chimera. This book is a rare Endeavour to look at happiness from the biological angle.

The author, Siddhartha Ganguli, who is a pioneer of multi-disciplinary sciences like bioengineering, human factors, psychobiology and human resource economics has regarded happiness, very simply and scientifically, as opposite of stress. The lifetime work of Dr Ganguli, documented in this book, provides ample tips for being happy in all aspects of living and working.

Educated at the universities of Calcutta, Jadavpur and Glasgow and the British Institute of Management, London, Siddhartha Ganguli who holds a Ph.D. in bioengineering and several other academic colors, is a polymath. He has most diplomatically managed a merger between engineering and technology, physiology and psychology, medicine and surgery, and management and economics. Winner of many national and international honors including the President of India Prize, he was instrumental in setting up India's first hospital-based bioengineering unit at the University College of Medicine, University of Calcutta where he taught and did clinical research for more than twenty years. On the management front, his last two prize assignments were as: Secretary & Chief Executive, Calcutta Management Association (1974-80) and Managing Director, Prex Miniclocks Pvt. Ltd. (1980-83) before he set up Learning Club, a body-brain management boutique, which has trained thousands of people in over 900 organizations in India and its neighboring countries

This book looks at happiness entirely from a scientific perspective. It is being offered with the potential to bring you face to face with your natural powers and propensities, proper utilization of which can put you on the happiness highway by changing your present route where you have been using a different, perhaps a wrong track. In that context, it tells you what kind of lifestyle is right and what is wrong which causes harm to your powers and lands you into distress. It also provides you with the solutions to the problems you commonly face in your daily living and working. It stimulates your intelligence and reasoning power so that you think before you move towards any object or experience of pleasure (and not happiness) unlike my 'mind (brain?) less' flat mate rodent (you patiently wait until you read about him in the 'Introduction') who has already turned disproportionately obese due to his greed for junk food and is most likely to face his untimely end one of these days-may be even before you reach the last page of this volume.

However, don't take the lessons as a warning; instead regard them as a set of friendly advices. This book is a sincere Endeavour to introduce you to the Science of Happy Living and Working.

He was right there in the dark cramped corner, where I had never expected him. I had just stepped into the kitchen to organize a few things. Then I thought I ought to clean up the floor. As I picked up the broom and removed some waste bins from underneath the main kitchen table, suddenly a half-eaten loaf came into my sight. I could smell the presence of a creaturely flat mate that I had met earlier. He would often go past us, when we switched off the lights at night.

Then, all of a sudden, he came into sight-an eight to ten inches long plump to obese grayish brown rat with a long tail. Our strong rat poison had killed in the past most of his folks. He was one of the few survivors. The moment he got the glimpse of me, he rushed out and got lost. And, as far as I am concerned, now that I have seen him, I have known about his existence in our flat, I'll procure more rat poison, and this time the strongest and the costliest available, mix it with wheat or flour dough and put it in his favorite corner which he frequents. His greed will prompt him towards the poisoned food (as his tiny brain does not have the intelligence to stimulate suspicion), he'll consume it to derive pleasure and die his untimely death.

SQUARE PEGS IN ROUND HOLES

Household rodents live in an alien environment and have a lifestyle which is not natural for them, as compared to their counterparts living in green fields and forests. As a matter of fact, rodents have evolved through millions and millions of years and have acquired physical and behavioral features to feel free in those natural settings. There, they have to really exercise their inherent talents and s' 'Hs to arrange the food compatible with their system, build their shelter, ensure their security, find their matching partners for mating, and take care of water their litter. As a result, their bodies and brains are utilized for survival and aware sustenance of the rodent species, which constitute the goals of the life form. Firs This, for them, leads to some kind of inner molecular satisfaction for feeling As a n worthy (shall we call it happiness?), which they do not recognize that way as environ their brains are not capable of doing so. If they had not experienced any subtle genera cellular satisfaction and the consequent motivation to continue participation in dentin the rat race for survival, how could they have managed to go through the trials inters and strains of earthly existence for so many millions of years and helped to Sea carry through their species form merrily to inhabit our remarkably beautiful Forms yet most hazardous mother planet Earth?

When they come to a human settlement like a big town or a metro city available (villages and small towns have fields and forests located close by) and start living in households, as the supply of food (and that too man-made food and THE H other scrap like paperboard, paper, textile, plastic and so on) for them gets assured, they enter and start living in, what one may describe as the comfort Man, zone. The inherent capabilities that every baby rodent is endowed with at birth, planet owing to millions of years of evolution, do not get fully utilized, thus creating several problems related to their living and working which only rodent experts would be knowing of.

City-based rodents are thus like square pegs in round holes. They left their Let natural habitats and came to the materialistic society in search of a better life beings and happiness. They got comfort instead, mixed with pain, although they were which born to be happy.

BORN TO BE HAPPY

Today, in our planet, like the rodents I've just talked about, every creature is halt k designed in every respect to be placed in an environment where it ought to feel to be free and worthy and be happy.

And, it is the processes of evolution and natural selection that are responsible for the situation. A typical feature of those processes is that organisms evolve in a way that they create their own environments, and in that sense every In organism is more or less fit-to use Charles Darwin's own term-for the environment in which it finds itself.

Thus, one should not be surprised to find a number of organisms living merrily in hot springs and volcano pools.