About the happynesswalas™
How a crippling crisis has led Vaani and AVIS to invest their every waking hour in Inspiring ‘Happyness’™!
5-minute read
5-minute read
Vaani and AVIS, August 2006. Picture credit: Meghana Karthik
The crisis
For 18 years now, Vaani and AVIS have been in the throes of a unique, Life-changing crisis. Their erstwhile consulting firm went bankrupt in end-2007. This plunged their Life into a deep, seemingly endless, dark hole. Ever since, they have been dealing with innumerable grave challenges. On the one side, they have had to constantly face the social, professional, financial and legal implications (lawsuits and police complaints filed by angry creditors) of their bankruptcy. On the other – emotional – side, this period has been intensely painful for them. When the realization that they were bankrupt dawned upon them, they were initially pinned down by fear, insecurity, anger, grief, guilt, anxiety and incessant worry. Besides, despite trying very hard, they have been unable to turn around their financially devastated Life. So, many times, from early-2008 onward, they have had to live through long spells of worklessness and pennilessness. “Facing rejection and failure repeatedly and not knowing what to do to fix your material Life can be extremely demoralizing. It can extinguish your will to keep going. We have known that feeling very closely,” confesses AVIS.
For 18 years now, Vaani and AVIS have been in the throes of a unique, Life-changing crisis. Their erstwhile consulting firm went bankrupt in end-2007. This plunged their Life into a deep, seemingly endless, dark hole. Ever since, they have been dealing with innumerable grave challenges. On the one side, they have had to constantly face the social, professional, financial and legal implications (lawsuits and police complaints filed by angry creditors) of their bankruptcy. On the other – emotional – side, this period has been intensely painful for them. When the realization that they were bankrupt dawned upon them, they were initially pinned down by fear, insecurity, anger, grief, guilt, anxiety and incessant worry. Besides, despite trying very hard, they have been unable to turn around their financially devastated Life. So, many times, from early-2008 onward, they have had to live through long spells of worklessness and pennilessness. “Facing rejection and failure repeatedly and not knowing what to do to fix your material Life can be extremely demoralizing. It can extinguish your will to keep going. We have known that feeling very closely,” confesses AVIS.
Vaani and AVIS, March 2013. Picture credit: C.P. Satyajit
The awakening
Wrestling with this crippling phase of their Life, Vaani and AVIS began asking themselves deep, soul-searching questions: What is the meaning of Life? Why do ‘bad’ things happen to ‘good’ people? What must we do to survive this storm? How can we live by our values in times of intense distress? Can we really be happy despite our circumstances? Their inquiry led them to a magical, liberating realization: No matter what, Life must be faced. It must be lived fully, happily, one day at a time, with what is! They discovered that Happiness is not something that you pursue. It is not what you achieve after certain conditions you have set for yourself have been fulfilled. They realized that Happiness is the art of being non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering in every context in Life. Even if the context or situation is an unwelcome, challenging and hugely painful one. Through the practice of mouna – observing daily silence periods – they taught themselves this art.
Their newfound ability to be consistently happy did not require them to possess any special skill or follow any complex process. They simply chose to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering every time a reason for being unhappy presented itself. “A rare inner strength began flowing from within us. And that strength, we understood, came from our choice to not worry, to not be frustrated in the wake of failure and rejection, and to not ask why we were going through this terrible time. We soon realized that our Happiness was helping us to deal with our problem in an infinitely better manner,” explains AVIS.
The three powers
This awakening also led Vaani and AVIS to discover three powers within themselves that they never thought they had possessed before. These are the powers of reflection, resilience and resourcefulness. This is how they define and relate to these powers:
The purpose
Employing these three powers, 18 years on, Vaani and AVIS continue to face their challenges stoically, resolutely. To be sure, they haven’t yet been able to turn around their business and repay their debt. So, in a worldly sense, they haven’t quite been successful. But, over these years, they have been learning significant Life lessons from their lived experiences. Importantly, they have also been keeping themselves inspired by looking at the stories of people around them.
Doing this has led them to gain a deep understanding of the process of Life. They have realized that no one’s Life is free from pain or challenges. Everyone has to go through their own dark phases to find meaning and inner peace.
Conversations between Vaani and AVIS are often long and reflective. They always discuss two important questions:
Over time, they recognized a sublime, graceful, spiritual evolution happening in them. During one conversation between them, they asked themselves a different, all-important question. Vaani recalls that conversation vividly: “I invited AVIS to consider flipping the paradigm. I asked him: ‘Why don’t we try being useful even if we can’t be successful? After all, everyone is caught in their own problem situation in Life. And Happiness is what everyone is seeking. Why not share our experiences and learnings with them?’” This realization that they can be useful even when they are not successful, led Vaani and AVIS to their Life’s purpose – Inspiring ‘Happyness’™!
The couple have intentionally kept their purpose statement simple. Just two words: Inspiring ‘Happyness’™! This is their raison d’etre, their ikigai. It wakes them up every morning. And leads them to constantly look for ways in which they can share what they have learned about Life and Happiness with anyone who is willing to pause and reflect.
Vaani and AVIS believe that they are having to go through this enduring crisis only so that their Life’s purpose could have found them. They spell ‘Happyness’ with a ‘y’ for a reason: They want to remind people that Happiness is a decision that you, the individual, must mindfully take each time you are confronted with a situation that makes you unhappy.
“Our purpose makes our Life meaningful. It makes our every waking hour count,” says AVIS.
Wrestling with this crippling phase of their Life, Vaani and AVIS began asking themselves deep, soul-searching questions: What is the meaning of Life? Why do ‘bad’ things happen to ‘good’ people? What must we do to survive this storm? How can we live by our values in times of intense distress? Can we really be happy despite our circumstances? Their inquiry led them to a magical, liberating realization: No matter what, Life must be faced. It must be lived fully, happily, one day at a time, with what is! They discovered that Happiness is not something that you pursue. It is not what you achieve after certain conditions you have set for yourself have been fulfilled. They realized that Happiness is the art of being non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering in every context in Life. Even if the context or situation is an unwelcome, challenging and hugely painful one. Through the practice of mouna – observing daily silence periods – they taught themselves this art.
Their newfound ability to be consistently happy did not require them to possess any special skill or follow any complex process. They simply chose to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering every time a reason for being unhappy presented itself. “A rare inner strength began flowing from within us. And that strength, we understood, came from our choice to not worry, to not be frustrated in the wake of failure and rejection, and to not ask why we were going through this terrible time. We soon realized that our Happiness was helping us to deal with our problem in an infinitely better manner,” explains AVIS.
The three powers
This awakening also led Vaani and AVIS to discover three powers within themselves that they never thought they had possessed before. These are the powers of reflection, resilience and resourcefulness. This is how they define and relate to these powers:
- Reflection: The ability to pause and ask important – and often difficult – questions about your Life and your purpose here on this planet.
- Resilience: The ability to pick yourself up each time after you are knocked down, to remain strong and to keep moving.
- Resourcefulness: The ability to make do with what you have while choosing to be non-complaining.
The purpose
Employing these three powers, 18 years on, Vaani and AVIS continue to face their challenges stoically, resolutely. To be sure, they haven’t yet been able to turn around their business and repay their debt. So, in a worldly sense, they haven’t quite been successful. But, over these years, they have been learning significant Life lessons from their lived experiences. Importantly, they have also been keeping themselves inspired by looking at the stories of people around them.
Doing this has led them to gain a deep understanding of the process of Life. They have realized that no one’s Life is free from pain or challenges. Everyone has to go through their own dark phases to find meaning and inner peace.
Conversations between Vaani and AVIS are often long and reflective. They always discuss two important questions:
- “What did we learn about Life today?” This would lead them to share notes on the people that they had read about or met recently. Through understanding their stories, the couple gained fresh insights on Life and Happiness.
- “How can we rebuild our business?” This would lead them to relentlessly explore creative ideas that could help turnaround their business.
Over time, they recognized a sublime, graceful, spiritual evolution happening in them. During one conversation between them, they asked themselves a different, all-important question. Vaani recalls that conversation vividly: “I invited AVIS to consider flipping the paradigm. I asked him: ‘Why don’t we try being useful even if we can’t be successful? After all, everyone is caught in their own problem situation in Life. And Happiness is what everyone is seeking. Why not share our experiences and learnings with them?’” This realization that they can be useful even when they are not successful, led Vaani and AVIS to their Life’s purpose – Inspiring ‘Happyness’™!
The couple have intentionally kept their purpose statement simple. Just two words: Inspiring ‘Happyness’™! This is their raison d’etre, their ikigai. It wakes them up every morning. And leads them to constantly look for ways in which they can share what they have learned about Life and Happiness with anyone who is willing to pause and reflect.
Vaani and AVIS believe that they are having to go through this enduring crisis only so that their Life’s purpose could have found them. They spell ‘Happyness’ with a ‘y’ for a reason: They want to remind people that Happiness is a decision that you, the individual, must mindfully take each time you are confronted with a situation that makes you unhappy.
“Our purpose makes our Life meaningful. It makes our every waking hour count,” says AVIS.
The prayer
Interestingly, despite living a purpose-driven Life, Vaani and AVIS’ crisis is far from over. It still endures. But they are guided by their philosophy to be useful even when you are not successful. So, wearing their Life on the sleeve, AVIS wrote his book, Fall Like A Rose Petal. It was first published in August 2014. The book’s message of Happiness and contentment instantly resonated with its readers. This has encouraged the couple to share the lessons they have learned from their unique journey with diverse audiences.
Vaani and AVIS do this in three powerful ways:
As expert writers and biographers: Through commissioned writing projects, they enable people to share their own stories and extraordinary Life journeys with the world. Their specialized offering Biographies by the happynesswalas™ has a bouquet of innovative programs:
As culture specialists: CEOs and business leaders love Vaani and AVIS’ customized culture transformation program, The Culture Champions™. Through this program, the couple invite managers to choose and employ Happiness for high performance. Read more here. Vaani and AVIS also offer several signature culture-building programs. Read more here.
Vaani and AVIS don’t see their bankruptcy as a curse or as a burden. To them, it is a blessing – and a responsibility. They believe that they are still in the game. They are working very hard to solve the financial and circumstantial crisis that they continue to deal with. At the same time, they remain soaked in gratitude for the unputdownable Life lessons that this experience – this phase of their Life – has taught them. No matter what new twist has arrived in their story, each morning they wake up to inspire people to be happy despite their circumstances. To them, this is their prayer, their humble offering to the universe.
“Being the happynesswalas™ is what makes us come alive. We haven’t just been surviving this crisis, we are thriving in it!” exclaims Vaani.
Interestingly, despite living a purpose-driven Life, Vaani and AVIS’ crisis is far from over. It still endures. But they are guided by their philosophy to be useful even when you are not successful. So, wearing their Life on the sleeve, AVIS wrote his book, Fall Like A Rose Petal. It was first published in August 2014. The book’s message of Happiness and contentment instantly resonated with its readers. This has encouraged the couple to share the lessons they have learned from their unique journey with diverse audiences.
Vaani and AVIS do this in three powerful ways:
As expert writers and biographers: Through commissioned writing projects, they enable people to share their own stories and extraordinary Life journeys with the world. Their specialized offering Biographies by the happynesswalas™ has a bouquet of innovative programs:
- Commissioned biographies: This program helps immortalize interesting Life journeys. Read more here.
- Celebrating Your Superstar Parents™: This program helps chronicle a family’s history, its lived experiences and its learnings, while celebrating its superstar parents. Read more here.
- The Unputdownable Story™: This program helps tell the stories of individuals, brands and organizations masterfully, brilliantly. Read more here.
As culture specialists: CEOs and business leaders love Vaani and AVIS’ customized culture transformation program, The Culture Champions™. Through this program, the couple invite managers to choose and employ Happiness for high performance. Read more here. Vaani and AVIS also offer several signature culture-building programs. Read more here.
Vaani and AVIS don’t see their bankruptcy as a curse or as a burden. To them, it is a blessing – and a responsibility. They believe that they are still in the game. They are working very hard to solve the financial and circumstantial crisis that they continue to deal with. At the same time, they remain soaked in gratitude for the unputdownable Life lessons that this experience – this phase of their Life – has taught them. No matter what new twist has arrived in their story, each morning they wake up to inspire people to be happy despite their circumstances. To them, this is their prayer, their humble offering to the universe.
“Being the happynesswalas™ is what makes us come alive. We haven’t just been surviving this crisis, we are thriving in it!” exclaims Vaani.
Vaani and AVIS with photographer and #BlissCatcher™ Srivatsan Sankaran at the Inspire India Youth Conclave, in March 2020, in Coimbatore.
More about the happynesswalas™:
Vaani and AVIS are premium, world-class professionals.
They have close to four decades of experience in business. They started off as journalists and have evolved into being top-drawer writers and biographers now. Having been entrepreneurs - in the management consulting space - for almost 30 years, they have developed great expertise in building and transforming organizational culture. Along the way, they have also emerged as powerful speakers and inspiring conversationalists.
Early years in media
Vaani and AVIS were both in the media industry early on in their careers.
AVIS has worked with The Indian Express, India Today, Businessworld and Business Today. At The Indian Express, AVIS wrote a very impactful and popular column called Suburban Orbit. This column carried in-depth, investigative stories on the serious lapses in civic administration in the suburbs of Chennai (then Madras). In 1989, AVIS won the Vigil Award and the Junior Chamber International’s National Outstanding Young Person Award for this column. At India Today, AVIS co-wrote the cover story on Rajiv Gandhi’s assassination in May 1991. He and India Today’s photographer Shyam Tekwani were the only two journalists who traveled on the special plane that carried Rajiv Gandhi’s body from Chennai to New Delhi on the morning of Wednesday, May 22, 1991. AVIS’ coverage of the events that led to the assassination and of the assassination itself were sharp and exclusive. Also, when he was based in Kerala with India Today, AVIS wrote powerful human-interest features. One was on the broken lives of the people working in the state’s thriving bamboo industry. And the other was on the women of Aruvacode, a village near Nilambur in North Kerala. These women were being driven to join the sex trade to earn a living. This story led to constructive action from Kerala’s women and social welfare department. A development program was initiated that led to the whole village being transformed. The women were taught pottery. AVIS’ story and the government intervention that followed have had a profound, long-lasting impact: Aruvacode today produces some of the finest pottery and terracotta works in India. While at Business Today, AVIS contributed significantly to the magazine’s strategy, leadership and startup sections. He wrote in-depth stories profiling renowned founders and CEOs of Indian business houses.
Vaani has written evocative, human-interest features for The Times of India, Verve magazine and The Economic Times’ supplement, Madras Plus. Although she has profiled both celebrities and unsung people, she has always focused on talking about what made each of them human. She has had the unique opportunity to interview both Vani Ganapathy and Kamal Hassan. The celebrity couple had separated by then. Meeting them individually, Vaani dealt with their choices and journeys with sensitivity and dignity. Such empathy was – and still is – rare in the media world.
Important corporate stints
In the 1990s, AVIS also worked in leadership roles in the corporate sector. One of his stints was at the Sterling Group. He was the globe-trotting executive assistant to its chairman and maverick entrepreneur Siva (C. Sivasankaran). In that assignment, AVIS anchored key projects that helped usher in two major technological developments in India: cellular telephony and direct-to-home television.
Glory and bankruptcy
In August 1996, Vaani and AVIS set up their management consultancy imagequity+® in Chennai, in South India. It was Asia’s first reputation management firm. Their firm offered a pioneering and remarkable program – TrM® (Total Reputation Management). This program helped companies build a sound reputation by first building a values-based, high-performance culture. In 2000, the Reputation Institute (the reputation management industry’s apex global body, then based in New York) recognized TrM® as a stellar practitioner model for reputation management.
This recognition further fueled Vaani and AVIS’ enthusiasm to enhance the reach and impact of their breakthrough program. The idea that a company must first focus on its culture to build and protect its reputation resonated with every business leader that they met. Starting with a few Chennai-based corporates, Vaani and AVIS soon began leading culture-building and reputation management initiatives alongside CEOs at several organizations – both in India and across the world.
In 2003, the couple took an important, ethical decision to separate from an unethical client. But their firm had a significant revenue exposure to this client. Resultantly, their decision landed their firm in a bankruptcy in end-2007. Read more about this in AVIS’ book Fall Like A Rose Petal and here.
Culture specialists
Although Vaani and AVIS are still dealing with that crisis, they continue to specialize in work related to organizational culture. They have great insight and experience in building culture in entrepreneurial and high-growth environments. They are experts in deriving, embellishing and embedding the key statements of intent in an organization – its purpose, vision, values and mission. They coach business leaders to build a vibrant and thriving culture that nurtures talent, fosters innovation and attracts investment. They do all this through a powerful program that they offer called The Culture Champions™. Read more about the program here.
Continuously celebrating Life
While the couple are invested in their purpose of Inspiring ‘Happyness’™, they are also continuously celebrating the magic and beauty of Life. They are constantly exploring human stories, to understand the Life journeys of people better and to learn what each one’s idea of Happiness is.
Remarkably, they draw inspiration from the lives and works of Bollywood’s greatest filmmakers: On one side, they are constantly discovering Life lessons in all the beautiful poetry and music that has flown through Bollywood for over a century now. On the other, they keep exploring how Indian filmmakers often face huge challenges and endure enormous pain to follow their bliss and create great art. Their explorations, reflections and learnings are now part of a powerful program that they offer called Bollywood, My Teacher™. Read more about this program here.
Living with purpose
Vaani and AVIS live by their purpose daily. Despite their challenges, they believe that there is always an opportunity to be grateful, to be happy, to inspire Happiness and to create world-class stuff - daily. If you want to be inspired and want to invite Vaani and AVIS to create value for you, contact them here.
Additional links on the happynesswalas™:
- Rise In Love: A 2015 documentary, made by a young filmmaker, Shalu C. While focusing on the journey of Vaani and AVIS, the film explores how love thrives in the face of adversity. Viewing time: 30.18 minutes.
- How this Chennai couple rose from bankruptcy to create million moments of Happiness: A story (that originally appeared in April 2016) by Dipti Nair in YourStory. It looks at how Vaani and AVIS are living a Life of purpose - Inspiring ‘Happyness’™! 3-minute read.
- The Reason Why You Live: A 2019 documentary, made by conservation educator and #BlissCatcher™ K. Ramnath Chandrasekhar. It showcases the journey of The Bliss Catchers™, the longest-running and most popular conversation series curated by Vaani and AVIS. Viewing time: 12.33 minutes.
- Chennai couple inspires to be happy, tells stories of resilience: A story from September 2019 by Bhavani Prabhakar in News Today. It explains how Vaani and AVIS live a purposeful Life, inviting people to be happy by learning to be non-worrying, non-frustrated and non-suffering. 1-minute read.
- When Happyness hits a century: A story from April 2019 by Roshne Balasubramanian in The New Indian Express - Chennai Express. This story explores Vaani and AVIS’ purpose of Inspiring ‘Happyness’™ and celebrates their 100th curated conversation. 1-minute read.
- Against the odds: A story from April 2019 by Meghna Majumdar in The Hindu - MetroPlus. It celebrates Vaani and AVIS’ 100th curated conversation and showcases why they do what they do. 1-minute read.
