The Mirror Within

Santhosh grew up in a rich business clan in Chennai. With a quick-witted brain and a taste for adventure, he consumed every joy life had to give—race cars, crazy parties, foreign trips. His friends used to say as his name 'Santhosh' meant happiness, he actually incarnated 'The Happiness'. But to Santhosh, it wasn't; with each thrill was an emptier void. Sometime the next morning, after a night out had left him especially numb, he looked in the mirror and demanded, "Why am I not happy?"

In an abrupt turn of defiance, Santhosh lost it all. He shaved his scalp, wore saffron clothes, and moved from ashram to ashram between Rishikesh and Varanasi. But the Himalayas' silence only rang with echoes of bewilderment. The more he attempted to "be spiritual," the heavier he became. He did rituals, chanted day and night, fasted strictly—but nothing seemed to bring harmony.

Disillusioned, he arrived in Thiruvannamalai, the sacred hill of Arunachala. There, under a neem tree at the base of the hill, near the Samadhi shrine of sage Ramana Maharishi, he found a Guru who was surrounded by few seekers, yet said little. Intrigued, Santhosh sat next to him.

After hours of silence, Guru turned to him smiled and said, “To whom is this unhappiness arising?”

Santhosh stammered, “To me… of course.”

Guru looked back at the Annamalai hill once and turned towards him and asked, “Who are you?”

This innocently straightforward question ignited something in Santhosh. Over the next few months, he sat at the guru's feet, not hearing any answers but asking himself the same question repeatedly "Who Am I?". 

He began to see how he had sought happiness in the external—things, prestige, even renunciation. But happiness wasn't something to be sought—it was the gap between thoughts, awareness that observed without judgment.

One morning, while the golden light kissed Arunachala, Santhosh experienced a shift—not a climax of ecstasy, but a stable, peaceful calm that required no cause. He smiled quietly for the first time in years.

Years later, Santhosh would still reside close to the hill—not a householder nor a recluse—just a man who had turned inward and discovered what he had always sought.

Moral: 

Real happiness is not in gaining or losing—it is in seeing who we are under all looking.

Inspiration:

Happiness is your nature. It is not wrong to desire it. What is wrong is seeking it outside when it is inside. — Ramana Maharshi