Kaushik Basu happy ability to not reason.

 In a new book titled 'Reason to Be Happy: The Unexpected Benefits of Thinking Clearly’, Kaushik Basu reveals that he began to feel depressed after moving to Delhi to attend St. Stephens at the age of 17. By the time he shifted to the LSE for his MSc & PhD it had disappeared. Most Indians above a certain age would remember how fucking horrible India was back in the Seventies. Living at home was okay because Mummy and Daddy and Granny etc. are very good for hugging and kissing purposes. But the rest of the country was horrible. People who were utterly suicidal turned into little beams of sunshine the moment their plane left Indian airspace. 

True, actually reasoning this out by thinking clearly would make an Indian economist unhappy. After all, it would have been easy enough to Trade theory or some other useful field so as to promote better economic policies back home. Back in the late Fifties, a couple of Chinese-American economists at Cornel had helped Taiwan move on to an export-led growth strategy. But, being Bengali, Basu was forbidden to take this road. 

This was more particularly true if you were studying Economics because India's manifold problems had clearly been caused by shitty Economists like Sukhamoy Chakroborty. True, Amartya Sen, who had to leave India because he had run off with his best friend's wife, was teaching useless shite at the LSE but fuck do we care if Whites fuck up their own economy? They owe us big time for Slavery or the Raj or whatever. 

Consider the following

After returning to college from the two-week October break, the plunge began. To this day, I do not know quite what happened to me.

You were studying Econ- the most boring subject in the world- in Delhi, which had made it its business to fuck up the Indian Economy.  

Was it triggered by moving out of a home where I felt totally, absurdly protected?

Yes. But having to study stupid shite didn't help. 

Was it caused by a feeling of inferiority – a concern that I was not up to the mark with such smart classmates?

If you were smart you'd have got into medical school or IIT 

Was it a specific psychological problem which had a name?

Excessive Masturbation. But this is only a problem for your room-mate.  

Were there others who got it? Is it known what causes it?

We know what cures it. Booze. Lots of booze.  

For me, now, this is a matter of pure intellectual curiosity. In case one of my readers has an answer, let me fill you in with one or two details. One marked feature of this anxiety or depression or melancholia – I do not quite know what to call it – was its clear daily routine. I would wake up feeling more or less fine, then sometime in the morning,

i.e. when lectures began 

the anxiety would start, building up through the day, becoming acute by late afternoon.

other kids studying mathematics or English lit were enjoying their classes. If you were doing Econ people looked upon you with pity. 

Then, as night descended, it would begin to ease.

At that age, I masturbated for about five hours a night. I could have gone longer but tended to fall asleep. This is one reason I got sacked from my job as a night receptionist. 

As the months passed, the daily interval of calm, from night to morning, kept getting shorter.

Basu masturbated more. Wankers do well in mathematical econ. 

This growing anxiety and depression were accompanied by a loss of interest in everything.

there is a point when you are no longer picturing naked girls when you masturbate. Indeed you are telling them to put their clothes back on and take a cab home. You've got your hands too full to waste time on them. 

It had no daily cycle; it was persistent. I had no ambition; I no longer cared for any of the things that had been dear to my heart. It was a cause of genuine despair that I appeared to be living with no purpose whatsoever.

Repainting the ceiling with ejaculate isn't the sort of life project you can boast about at dinner parties.  

I read that John Stuart Mill had a similar episode in his life when he was twenty.

Mill masturbated? What about Macaulay? Meredith I can understand but Thomas Babington Macaulay? And to think we had to read his 'Great Lays of Ancient Rome' in middle school. 

Normally, I would have been thrilled to find that I had something in common with John Stuart Mill,

Mill died a virgin. At 17, that tends to be one's big fear.  

but at the time this too meant nothing. I continued to attend classes, had lots of friends, genuine and close. No one guessed what I was going through.

If you are 17 everybody just assumes you are jacking off at least 5 times a day.  

After a year, I was fully reconciled to the fact that this pall of darkness would never lift from my life.

Touching a boob works wonders. Sadly the people who design bras want young men to lose the will to live.  

But it did. I do not know what got me out of it.

Emigration.  

I did see a psychiatrist in Kolkata in the middle of this, the only time in my life when I have done so.

I saw a psychiatrist in London. Sadly, she too saw me and told my Mother I was buying pornographic magazines. How was I supposed to know that Double Entry digest wasn't about the fundamental principles of Book-keeping.  

A well-read, cerebral person,

unlike most psychiatrists in Calcutta who tend to be illiterate 

he talked about Freud, Jung and others, and said that a lot of human problems arise from our ascribing too much importance to one aim in life – sex, money or fame.

Whereas Bengal's problems were caused by the fact that it didn't ascribe enough importance to making money.  

He said that, for people of my age, a lot of psychological stress arose from latent sexual anxiety.

It is anxiety about whether you will ever get to touch boob. Also, what if women have teeth down there.  

He blamed Freud for this. Freud’s emphasis on the sexual origins of our psychological problems became self-fulfilling.

He thought we wanted to fuck Mum and kill Dad. Most of us are content to just kiss the one and hug and squeeze the other. The trouble with the Viennese Jews was that were very competitive. Sooner or later, one of them was bound to go too far.  

The psychiatrist argued that once we realize there is no single purpose or target in life that takes precedence over the others,

This was convenient. The Doctor shouldn't feel his purpose is to make his patients better.  He should take a dump during consultations. 

it takes a huge load off our shoulders.

Why worry about whether you are doing your job properly. Just phone it in. That will take a load off your shoulders.  

I don’t know whether his counselling helped me directly, but I remember his intelligent, humane conversation fondly.

Did he take a dump during the consultation? Probably not. That's the sort of thing people remember.  

The start of the lifting of the depression – I call it depression for want of a better word – from around the age of twenty was quite baffling,

Basu had gotten to London. London isn't too far from Amrika. An Indian's depression tends to lift as he gets to places where Whites are the majority.  

since by then I was reconciled to a life in its shadow. After another year or two, it was gone.

London was a great place to touch boob back in the early Seventies. European au pairs were very generous with their pair of pears.  

I did not speak about it for years. Partly out of shyness, partly a fear that, in talking about it, I might rekindle the dormant genie.

Or because people would have explained that touching boob is what cures depression in young men.  

I do not know what made the melancholia go away and whether, like some episodic virus, it would have gone away anyway, no matter what I did.

So long as it involved touching boob.  

But there is one strategy which I began using around this time, which has stood me in good stead: reasoning with myself, and trying to be completely honest when doing so.

If Basu he had reasoned with himself, he'd have seen that getting the fuck out of India and touching lots of boob works wonder for your mental health.  

Since I did not have access to antidepressants – almost no one in India at that time did –

but he could get them in London from the age of 20 onward. But, by then he didn't need them due to vast amount boobage within easy reach.  

reasoning inside my head was my only ammunition.

my ammunition was the vast amounts of jizz I aimed at the ceiling. Oddly, I didn't do well in academics.  

Whether or not it helped me specifically with my period of crisis, I emerged with the belief that honest, ruthless reasoning inside your head is one of the most powerful and underutilised recipes for happiness.

Economics is about 'Granger causality' or correlation. Basu is still too stupid to see that his depression was caused by studying stupid shit in India- where there was a good chance he might end up helping the Planning Commission fuck up the country- and getting to London from where it was a short hop, skip and PhD away from a nice American campus with lots of nubile co-eds. Also, unlike the Brits, American girls had good teeth. If Vagina Dentata are a real thing, it is a consolation to know that they have had proper orthodontic care.