Unboxing’s Comments (group member since Jul 14, 2023)

Unboxing’s comments from the HAPPIMESS by Biswajit Banerji Group discussion in collaboration with Indiacafe24.com group.

For me the writing style of this book is fun. The author wrote it in first person. The protagonist or we can say the author is narrating the story, so we get to know the direct perspective of the person and account of events which are pointed out in the story. The book is written mostly in explanatory form and casual dialogues are also included in the narrative. There is a wonderful use of satire and humor in the book. The author related the everyday activities with humoristic accounts. We can also see the connection with everyday humor. The situations we tend to avoid is the situation we end up attracting to ourselves is beautifully portrayed.

As far as the parallels are concerned, the stories draw a parallel with our everyday thoughts. It is something which goes in our mind every day, but we just can’t put it out. This book can also be considered as a parallel to the famous Indian Show “Tarak Mehta ka Ulta Chashma” where we see Jethalal always being stuck with the most unusual problems and how the universe conspires to complicate things which wouldn’t be an issue otherwise. Overall it’s fun, light and humoristic read.

Happimess - how else can this book connect humour and satire? The name itself makes the mess happy. Whether we like it or not, our lives are a mess and we have just two ways to deal with it - either you can whine about it the entire day or just laugh about it. The author selects the second one. When electronics decide to turn your day messy, you defeat it by making the day even massier. When you are hit by your wife, you can avoid being messy by just keeping quiet. Or when people are intolerably slow, we need to make some joke in the meantime. The author makes an interesting observation about how we attract things when we are trying to run away from them. The sarcasm is quite appropriately used in the book. The author is quite subtle about mixing these elements.