Yogi Kochhar is the Dharamshala-based former Director of Microsoft India and currently founder of YOL Happiness Foundation and a happiness savant and evangelist. Excerpts from an interview.

Congratulations for your appointment as a director on the board of the World Happiness Foundation (WHF, estb.2022). What are the aims and objectives of the foundation?
We work in partnership with the United Nations, institutions, organisations, community leaders and individuals to attain the target of 10 billion free, conscious and happy people worldwide by 2050. It’s an honour to be on the WHF board of globally respected eminences such as marketing guru Prof. Philip Kotler, Dr. Satinder Rekhi, Dr. Saamdu Chetri and social entrepreneur Luis Gallardo to name a few. We are aligned with all 17 SDGs of the United Nations.

An economics and marketing alum of Punjab University and the American Global University, Florida, you began your career as a tea planter and later rose to the position of Director of Microsoft India. What were the major factors that prompted you to exit industry and promote the YOL Happiness Foundation (www.yol.one) in India?
My epiphany moment came when I was in Maui, Hawaii, on vacation where I met and was inspired by Harold Bloomfield, the celebrated author of books on happiness that have sold over 12 million copies worldwide.
After meeting Harold, I became aware that excessive industrialisation, economic growth and wealth accumulation have destroyed the Earth’s forests and precipitated climate change. Ironically last year, 1,210 private jets streaming carbon dioxide landed for the annual World Economic Forum fiesta in Davos, to discuss the co-relation between climate change and global poverty. To arrest climate change, we need to decarbonize the minds of people. Primitive capital and goods accumulation happens because our minds seek to placate the dope or dopamine rush that nudges us to buy more. The YOL Happiness Foundation has been promoted to educate people to limit wants and optimise their lives by pursuing happiness instead of wealth accumulation.

How satisfied are you with the progress of the YOL Happiness Foundation in India?
We have designed a blueprint for establishing Happiness Cities in the US and Europe. We have also designed a Happiness blueprint that can be adopted by states in India. Currently, India is building hundreds of Smart cities lacking soul and heart.

An interesting proposition advanced by YOL Foundation is that third world countries, India included, are experiencing a “second colonization” by Western countries. Except that this time, it’s western social media mega corporations who are invading and stealing the minds of our children and youth by stuffing them with trivia. Please elaborate.
Indian youth expend an average six hours per day on social media watching video reels featuring trivia that is ambiguous, random and meaningless, devoid of any context or contiguity irrespective of whether they bring their phone with them to school or not. Neither parents, teachers or youth are aware of this danger, therefore it is our responsibility to make them aware.
Today, education is a mere business sans true value creation with educationists toeing the official line of regulations and persisting with archaic pedagogy. We must realise that our minds have not only been hijacked, they have been colonised by social media apps that have trained our minds for neural switching ‘off’ and ‘on’ every three seconds.
To counter this, YOL Happiness Foundation has designed a gamified solution that has been approved by AICTE — All India Council for Technical Education — which oversees technical higher education countrywide. The foundation has the support of several truly eminent thinkers in the higher ed space including Prof. Anil D. Sahasrabudhe, Prof. T.G. Sitharam, Prof. Abhay Karandikar among others. They support our crusade to rescue children and youth from Western mind colonisation. Yol.com enables users to win back the mind that Western social media magacorps have eroded.

Therefore to counter the machinations of Metaverse, Google and their apps such as Facebook, X, Instagram and YouTube, you have designed the YOL app? What are the features of the app?
YOL is an app approved by AICTE as an essential program that provides a ‘mind map’ for students from class VIII onwards. It enables social media users to assess the mind share lost to mindless screen viewing — video reels and online trivia — on a daily basis through colour-coded signaling. By making users aware of time spent on random and ambiguous viewing, this app enables people to rewire their brains and focus on more important things rather than random stuff such as the mating habits of amazonian spiders. Today young people are lost in a dark rabbit hole where they suffer fear and anxiety that make their minds brittle, random, anxious, non-linear and weak.

What are the future growth and outreach plans of YOL?
My partner Jaya Kumar and I have ideated and designed yol.com to enable people to remain at the centre of this universe. We believe this app will help users to retain the mindshare that has been taken away, hijacked, and colonised from them.