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Home » Saisha Srivastava: What Nobody Told You About Happiness at TEDxJaiHindCollege (Transcript)

Saisha Srivastava: What Nobody Told You About Happiness at TEDxJaiHindCollege (Transcript)

Saisha Srivastava

Watch and read the full transcript of Saisha Srivastava’s TEDx Talk: What Nobody Told You About Happiness at TEDxJaiHindCollege Conference. This event occurred on August 7, 2015 in Mumbai, India.

Listen to the MP3 Audio here: what-nobody-told-you-about-happiness-by-saisha-srivastava-at-tedxjaihindcollege

 

Saisha Srivastava – Dancer

So you know how when you’re filling out a form or a questionnaire and it says: name, age, sex and you’re like fine, fine, fine. And then it asks you something like: so tell us about yourself. And then suddenly you’re like: oh my god who am I? And you sit there questioning everything you know about yourself.

In my experience, a lot of people once they graduate high school or in their early twenties, face a bit of a similar existential crisis when they’re suddenly confronted with the world full of its seemingly focused adults going in forward in very specific directions, because we try to find our place among them. Who really are we? What do we believe in? What kind of lives we want to lead? This realization dawned upon me when I looked at this photograph.

So you see when the satellite Voyager 1 was leaving — had gone past Neptune and was leaving the solar system, American astronomer, scientist and [general badass] Carl Sagan convinced NASA to turn the satellite around and take one last picture of the earth before it left the solar system. And he called this picture the Pale Blue Dot. And he spoke about how for us every single person that we know, every corrupt politician, every young couple in love, everyone has lived and loved and fought and laughed on a single speck of dust that is suspended in a sunbeam, and upon looking at this picture a lot of people have a startling realization of insignificance and smallness.