COVER STORIES

Advocating laughter for valley, tech worker gives birth to mirth

by MIKE CASSIDY

SILICON VALLEY DISPATCHES

ARYA Pathria takes laughing seriously.

He studies breathing and the difference between the open mouth laugh and the closed-mouth laugh. He considers the health benefits of a good guffaw. But most of all he practices. Every day, the way some people jog.

Hee-Hee. Ha-ha. Hee-Hee. Ha-Ha. He starts slowly and builds to full-blown, side aching laughter. And he can make you laugh, too.

“I needed to lighten up,”says Pathria, an advanced technology project manager at Sprint."As we grow old, we get serious. I’m trying to bring out the child state in people.”

Every morning, Pathria, 55, walks the hills of Alum Rock Park near his San Jose home and laughs. He laughs whenever he can steal a moment. His voice mail at work ends with a laugh. Same thing at home. He’ll chuckle in the middle of conversations. After a tough day, he’ll board his CalTrain home and have a good laugh.

“Actually,”I’m laughing most of the time.”

Silicon Valley, being high-tech and high-string, needs a good laugh, Pathria says, and he’s the man to provide it. But not with jokes.

“With jokes,”he says,”either you don’t have the jokes, or you get into ethnic jokes and sexual jokes and people get very uncomfortable.”

No. He laughs. And he insists on making you laugh> He even calls up friends just for giggles.

“Whenever we have a chance,”says Joy Kapur, a restaurateur and Pathria’s friend. “We just call each other and start laughing.”

Pathria has been laughing all his life, but he didn’t get serious until about three years ago. It grew from meditation and an article he saw that called laughing the deepest form of meditation.”

“In laughter, you forget everything, because your whole body is involved.”

He traveled to India, his homeland, to learn from a laugh master. He started showing up at nursing homes, offering to provide a laugh.

“People invite me for parties,”he says,”because they know I can make them laugh.”

He’s done the Rotary, Lions Clubs, senior centers and an Indian-American cable show. He’s done weddings, groups of unsuspecting strangers and a going-away party at work. So, Far, he says, he gets no complaints about his laughing from co-workers.

“They just moved me into the corner.”

For now, he does it free, to feed his passion.

“I’m trying to challenge myself,”he says,”to make people laugh, immaterial of age, immaterial of sex, immaterial of ethnic group.”

He’s formed an organization, Laughaway, of which he’s the only member, so far. He’s developed a two-hour seminar to the fine points of laughing on demand. And someday, he may launch a moneymaking business.

If it goes, he will laugh all the way to the bank.

Pathria’s Laughaway site is at http://www.laughaway.com. Have an only-in-Silicone-Valley story? Call Mike Cassidy at (408)-920-5536 or send e-mail to mcassidy@sjmercury.com