New Delhi: Every difficult time passes away; every tomorrow starts with today; happiness is the state of mind; if you change your goal of happiness in your life you will never be happy. These were some of the pointers that author Vibhor Kumar Singh shared while in conversation with Smitha Verma, Head of Editorial - Pluc & LetMeBreathe, at Club 5 DLF, Gurugram. The book launch and conversation session was attended by an engaging audience of the millennium city.
Vibhor Kumar Singh’s debut book ‘The Billionaire and the Monk’ published by Pan Macmillan in India is making international headlines amidst the response it has generated among the readers globally and in India. The book has been translated into several global languages: Greek, Italian, German, French, Spanish, Korean, and Portuguese. Translations in Turkish and Bulgarian are underway. The book was published in India by Pan Macmillan and has been published by Balance, an imprint of Hachette Book Group, in the USA and Canada.
During the conversation the author said he wrote this book during the pandemic, in the middle of lockdowns. “I have not written anything new. We all know how to be happy. The idea behind the book was not to give any more knowledge to people than what they already know. My idea was to make people think how they are getting things wrong,” he said.
He further added, “Happiness is all about having gratitude for today. It was very heartening to see the audience participate in the book talk by discussing happiness and its various aspects like minimalism, money and ambition. I thank everyone for a wonderful evening.”
The book speaks about finding happiness in your daily life. Happiness is not an enigma for a select few but a pearl of attainable wisdom for everyone. Vibhor Kumar Singh, a London School of Economics and Political Science, Shri Ram College of Commerce and Sherwood College alumni, uses a conversational style in which the billionaire and the monk learn from each other as they try and decipher the answer to a simple question “Are You Happy?”. Being an entrepreneur himself, the author brings out the practical and doable aspects of daily life that lead to the happiness bounty.
Smitha Verma, Head of Editorial, Pluc & LetMeBreathe said, ‘The best part of the book is that instead of treading the non-fiction format to talk about happiness, the author has shared his wisdom through beautiful friendship between a monk and a billionaire. Neither of them is without flaws. The monk wants materialism as much as the billionaire aspires for spiritualism. So in all it shows us the perfect balance between needs and desires.”
Set against the pristine beauty of the Tibetan highlands, the book explores areas of minimalism, meditation, money management, discipline, relationship and happiness through health.The book surprises and challenges conventional thinking by elaborating upon topics of ambition and the power of saying NO and linking them to our daily happiness quotient. At the end of the book, the author lists practical and feasible takeaways which can be adopted by everyone who is lost and looking to find their happiness road.
