Kartik Sharma's Blog, page 2

Stupid: 2

The pressures of not being one and the perks of being one

You can read the Chapter 1 here, before proceeding

Chapter 2: His name and what’s in it

In a rush to begin his story, his identity was forgotten. Seems like you’ve made it this far, so there might be interest in knowing a bit about him?

He is a man. A reduntant sentence in English language, if not for the many layers that it enfolds. It communicates how he is not a child, not a boy, not an adolescent, not a young adult, not a youth; all of which he was not very many years ago.

His name, since that’s still a humane way of indexing identities in this era of social security numbers where people are not much more than a statistic in a government database, lest they delude themselves, is Laxman. He is the only child of his parents. By his mother’s choice. When his father wanted to name him Ram, the elder brother from the Hindu mythology Ramayana, his mother insisted on Laxman, Ram’s younger sibling, primarily to avoid any misconceptions of having a Laxman later.

Couple of things wrong with that. One, his parents didn’t even want to consider the possibility of having a girl. Even in literate, scratch — educated families, that thought needed to be killed before it was born. Not very many years ago?

Two, the name Laxman deprived him of the luxury of ever being an alpha. People tend to inherit their names more often than not. Laxman was never destined to have an eponymous saga written after his life. Perhaps a novel to celebrate the novelty of a beta hero, yes, but never a saga. But then he wasn’t one to ever meet expectations and the story of his life came to be titled ‘Stupid’. Unfortunate, to say the least.

His mother did her best to manage his expectations when he was growing up. She used to tell him often that he is ‘Lakhon mein ek’. That expression does not have a direct translation in English. It basically means that he is one in 100,000. While she said it in a manner which made him feel special, or rather unique, at the time, he realized only when he was 14, and his Geography teacher told him, that there are 6 billion people on the planet, that it actually means that there are about 59,999 others like him. Only then did he realize how much his mother loved him and the lengths she went to protect him.

This was not very many years ago. Now there are 71,999 others like him. Every day he googles the world population before brushing his teeth. It relaxes him. He’s been off Xanax for 57 days.

He tries not to think about a room full of him and 71,999 people like him. That makes him want to take a Xanax.

With the introduction out of the way, let’s begin again.

Laxman debates whether to brush his teeth every morning. And today was no exception. This is not to say that he doesn’t brush every morning. But rather, that he likes to ask the question instead of following a habit mindlessly. He is amazed how for most it’s a given that the morning ablutions will be performed.

After thinking about it, and confirming after testing his morning breath, he decides that it would be appropriate to brush. While brushing he thinks about muscle memory and remembers The Bourne Identity. A man can completely forget his identity and still function at his peak thanks to his muscle memory. His passage through life would have been so much simpler if he could just get up and brush everyday, an action saved in his muscle memory, repeated ad infinitum till the day he stopped getting up from his bed.

He thinks that he should have built some muscles so that he could use their memory while he still had the chance, not very many years ago.

He then proceeds to worry, briefly, what would happen to him if he were to ever forget his identity. The thought scares him. It might actually be liberating, he thinks, second guessing himself. He would have fewer anxities, surely. Fewer things to think about. So what if he doesn’t brush when he doesn’t have a sense of his identity. He wouldn’t be the one caring; it would be the others. He chuckles at the thought.

He imagines his wife disgusted with his morning breath. At least that’s an accurate depiction of being human. Only in the movies people can make out before brushing their teeth in the morning and make it seem like the most natural thing. The magic of movies lies in selling unrealistic moments that lead to fantasies that foster more anxiety.

He cleans up and steps out of his bathroom. He trips on his slippers that he had parked outside the bathroom, caution thrown to the wind. Mid-trip, he thinks that he is because he thinks; a corollary to he thinks, therefore he is. His brain helped him solve his hypothetical identity crisis. He shields his head, that houses his brain, to protect his thought center as if it were the most valuable thing in the world. He scrapes his elbows. The perceived less fortunate always seem to take the toll of any collapse.

Thankfully, the perceived elite survive the fall.

He blows on the scrapes at the elbows, instinctively, before chastising himself for indulging in an inane action that has absolutely no purpose and no demonstrable benefit.

Shaking his head, he carries on with the rest of his morning. Under clear instructions to not wake up his wife, in case he’s the one getting up first on a Sunday, before the coffee is ready, he hurries to make two cups of coffee. Clear instructions are the best thing to have been invented by humans. They are the best anti-anxiety practice. He thinks how rules and laws were all possibly created by anxious folks who fortunately came to positions of power where they could inflict order on the world that seems to revel in the state of heightened entropy: chaos.

He wonders if he should wait for a bit before he wakes his wife up. He does like how peaceful she is when she is asleep.

But he likes how she lights up his life when she is up, much more.

He puts a spoonful of instant coffee in two mugs, scoffing — an every day routine for him. A teaspoon of coffee, he thinks. How lame. He feels sorry for coffee.

If the English had liked coffee as much as he did, they would have called it a coffeespoon. Or perhaps if an African nation had invented the steam engine first and colonized the world, they would have had coffeespoon equivalent in whatever language he would be thinking in right now.

He wonders if he would be reading of an Nigexit from the African Union these days and of imposition of a different world order in Europe. Would Chinua Achebe, if he were alive, or Ben Okri fund ‘Remain’ like JK Rowling did in the Brexit referendum?

They probably wouldn’t have to. Brexit won probably only because it sounded better than Bremain. Nigexit is as lame as Nigremain. Or actually, it would be called Nigeremain. That actually sounds better. Unless Nigexit sounds cooler in Hausa.

He puts a dash of milk, and fills the cups up with water before loading them into the microwave for a minute and thirty seconds. The machine starts whirring and he watches the cups dance. One has his picture and the other his wife’s. It’s the opposite of marking their cups. He drinks from her and she drinks from him. It’s probably still marking their cups, though.

He thinks of the jive class that she took in college, not very many years ago, as a part of her never ending zeal to share with everyone what she knew was joy-giving. He was dragged to her class by another girl, but after, or maybe during the first class, she became an ‘other girl’. He knew he was in love when his now-wife held him to demonstrate the moves for the benefit of her students.

To this day, she is the one who leads.

Stupid

The pressures of not being one and the perks of being one

You can read the Chapter 1 here, before proceeding

Chapter 2: His name and what’s in it

In a rush to begin his story, his identity was forgotten. Seems like you’ve made it this far, so there might be interest in knowing a bit about him?

He is a man. A reduntant sentence in English language, if not for the many layers that it enfolds. It communicates how he is not a child, not a boy, not an adolescent, not a young adult, not a youth; all of which he was not very many years ago.

His name, since that’s still a humane way of indexing identities in this era of social security numbers where people are not much more than a statistic in a government database, lest they delude themselves, is Laxman. He is the only child of his parents. By his mother’s choice. When his father wanted to name him Ram, the elder brother from the Hindu mythology Ramayana, his mother insisted on Laxman, Ram’s younger sibling, primarily to avoid any misconceptions of having a Laxman later.

Couple of things wrong with that. One, his parents didn’t even want to consider the possibility of having a girl. Even in literate, scratch — educated families, that thought needed to be killed before it was born. Not very many years ago?

Two, the name Laxman deprived him of the luxury of ever being an alpha. People tend to inherit their names more often than not. Laxman was never destined to have an eponymous saga written after his life. Perhaps a novel to celebrate the novelty of a beta hero, yes, but never a saga. But then he wasn’t one to ever meet expectations and the story of his life came to be titled ‘Stupid’. Unfortunate, to say the least.

His mother did her best to manage his expectations when he was growing up. She used to tell him often that he is ‘Lakhon mein ek’. That expression does not have a direct translation in English. It basically means that he is one in 100,000. While she said it in a manner which made him feel special, or rather unique, at the time, he realized only when he was 14, and his Geography teacher told him, that there are 6 billion people on the planet, that it actually means that there are about 59,999 others like him. Only then did he realize how much his mother loved him and the lengths she went to protect him.

This was not very many years ago. Now there are 71,999 others like him. Every day he googles the world population before brushing his teeth. It relaxes him. He’s been off Xanax for 57 days.

He tries not to think about a room full of him and 71,999 people like him. That makes him want to take a Xanax.

With the introduction out of the way, let’s begin again.

Laxman debates whether to brush his teeth every morning. And today was no exception. This is not to say that he doesn’t brush every morning. But rather, that he likes to ask the question instead of following a habit mindlessly. He is amazed how for most it’s a given that the morning ablutions will be performed.

After thinking about it, and confirming after testing his morning breath, he decides that it would be appropriate to brush. While brushing he thinks about muscle memory and remembers The Bourne Identity. A man can completely forget his identity and still function at his peak thanks to his muscle memory. His passage through life would have been so much simpler if he could just get up and brush everyday, an action saved in his muscle memory, repeated ad infinitum till the day he stopped getting up from his bed.

He thinks that he should have built some muscles so that he could use their memory while he still had the chance, not very many years ago.

He then proceeds to worry, briefly, what would happen to him if he were to ever forget his identity. The thought scares him. It might actually be liberating, he thinks, second guessing himself. He would have fewer anxities, surely. Fewer things to think about. So what if he doesn’t brush when he doesn’t have a sense of his identity. He wouldn’t be the one caring; it would be the others. He chuckles at the thought.

He imagines his wife disgusted with his morning breath. At least that’s an accurate depiction of being human. Only in the movies people can make out before brushing their teeth in the morning and make it seem like the most natural thing. The magic of movies lies in selling unrealistic moments that lead to fantasies that foster more anxiety.

He cleans up and steps out of his bathroom. He trips on his slippers that he had parked outside the bathroom, caution thrown to the wind. Mid-trip, he thinks that he is because he thinks; a corollary to he thinks, therefore he is. His brain helped him solve his hypothetical identity crisis. He shields his head, that houses his brain, to protect his thought center as if it were the most valuable thing in the world. He scrapes his elbows. The perceived less fortunate always seem to take the toll of any collapse.

Thankfully, the perceived elite survive the fall.

He blows on the scrapes at the elbows, instinctively, before chastising himself for indulging in an inane action that has absolutely no purpose and no demonstrable benefit.

Shaking his head, he carries on with the rest of his morning. Under clear instructions to not wake up his wife, in case he’s the one getting up first on a Sunday, before the coffee is ready, he hurries to make two cups of coffee. Clear instructions are the best thing to have been invented by humans. They are the best anti-anxiety practice. He thinks how rules and laws were all possibly created by anxious folks who fortunately came to positions of power where they could inflict order on the world that seems to revel in the state of heightened entropy: chaos.

He wonders if he should wait for a bit before he wakes his wife up. He does like how peaceful she is when she is asleep.

But he likes how she lights up his life when she is up, much more.

He puts a spoonful of instant coffee in two mugs, scoffing — an every day routine for him. A teaspoon of coffee, he thinks. How lame. He feels sorry for coffee.

If the English had liked coffee as much as he did, they would have called it a coffeespoon. Or perhaps if an African nation had invented the steam engine first and colonized the world, they would have had coffeespoon equivalent in whatever language he would be thinking in right now.

He wonders if he would be reading of an Nigexit from the African Union these days and of imposition of a different world order in Europe. Would Chinua Achebe, if he were alive, or Ben Okri fund ‘Remain’ like JK Rowling did in the Brexit referendum?

They probably wouldn’t have to. Brexit won probably only because it sounded better than Bremain. Nigexit is as lame as Nigremain. Or actually, it would be called Nigeremain. That actually sounds better. Unless Nigexit sounds cooler in Hausa.

He puts a dash of milk, and fills the cups up with water before loading them into the microwave for a minute and thirty seconds. The machine starts whirring and he watches the cups dance. One has his picture and the other his wife’s. It’s the opposite of marking their cups. He drinks from her and she drinks from him. It’s probably still marking their cups, though.

He thinks of the jive class that she took in college, not very many years ago, as a part of her never ending zeal to share with everyone what she knew was joy-giving. He was dragged to her class by another girl, but after, or maybe during the first class, she became an ‘other girl’. He knew he was in love when his now-wife held him to demonstrate the moves for the benefit of her students.

To this day, she is the one who leads.

Why I wrote DareDreamers

The philosophy behind my second novel

I co-wrote my second novel, DareDreamers: A Start-up of Superheroes with my father. It has been published by Rupa Publications. It was launched last week:

Launch of DareDreamers: A Start-up of Superheroes — my second novel

My first novel, The Quest of the Sparrows was also co-written with my father and also published by Rupa Publications in 2011.

Last week, when DareDreamers came out, I realised that I can now finally use the label ‘Novelist’ because now me and my dad have written two novels between the two of us — and that’s one per head! Our next goal, after writing two books, is to not be one-book authors.

This is just the beginning of the complexities of co-writing books. Not to mention the father-son dynamics that flummoxed even the Greek and Islamic mythologists! It’s nothing short of a miracle that we are both alive to see our work reach the readers after nearly five long years of working on it.

To understand the philosophy of the book, let me first share what the word DareDreamers means to us. And why is there no space between the two words.

There are those who day dream of that One Day, when they will do what they want. But OneDay simply does not exist in the seven days of the week, does it? That’s probably why the One Day doesn’t ever come for the day dreamers. DareDreamers on the other hand are those who don’t just dream big but also dare to turn their visions into reality. And just as DareDreamers do not let anything come between them and their dreams becoming real, we felt there should be no space between the two words.

DareDreamers, the novel, is the story of Rasiq, a typical engineering and MBA graduate in India. He begins his innings full of optimism and dreams about his corporate life at an investment bank where he imagines himself battle ready.
He works hard and endures a lot but as days turn into weeks and months, he finds himself turning into a fundamentally different person from what he imagined. As we often do, he rationalizes almost everything he knows he’s doing wrong. Until he cannot do so anymore. By this time, however, he is a wreck. The only thing he doesn’t lose is his grit and determination.

The novel then, is the story of his gritty comeback. Pushed to the wall by his circumstances, he comes up with a start-up called DareDreamers, an accident rescue company which he co-founds with a team of super talented individuals who are superheroes in their own right. There’s Nick, his friend from his engineering college, who is an inventor. There’s Natasha from his school, who is a Bollywood stunts-woman. Then there’s Dr. Vyom who is a medical genius. Halka is an exiled bodyguard and Arjun is a sharp shooter. From this point, DareDreamers is a story of how they face and overcome challenges and obstacles to make their dream successful.

The book’s philosophy is one of choosing your battles. It’s normal in our societal construct to start on a beaten path of proven economic viability. You have to make decisions about the rest of your life when you are 16, if not younger, and most people end up making decisions from whatever limited experience they have. If we understand that these very kids are incapable of
political voting, then why do we think they are old enough for such a significant professional decision? One that will decide who they are supposed to be for the rest of their lives!

I, for example, loved fixing our second-hand car with my dad when it broke down every week. And decided I want to become an engineer when the choice came between engineering and medicine. I ended up doing Chemical engineering that has very little, if at all anything, to do with fixing cars!

Does that mean that I should keep trying to be the best chemical engineer? I worked really hard for my grades till I graduated — just because there wasn’t anything better to do. I did well not because I was passionate about chemical engineering, but because I wasn’t passionate about anything else either.

In that sense, I was the tortoise in the fable of the hare and the tortoise. I kept chiseling slowly, mindlessly I would say, at a wall that I had no real reason or drive to break. But I discovered my love for writing in that ambivalence. I wrote science fiction short stories, a few of which actually got published. I wrote a novel that I never finished — but simply loved to write. This led me to think that I probably, slowly was transforming into the hare who is uninterested in running a race against a tortoise simply because the jungle has gathered to watch. I feel the hare is judged too harshly in that fable for not doing as he was told to do. I believe that napping is better sometimes than running a meaningless race.

The fable of The Hare and The Tortoise was written back in the era of industrial revolution when slow, steady effort mattered more than free, independent thinking. With the changing times, we need our own fable.

DareDreamers is the story of a hare who abandoned one race, but ran like his life depended on it when he was in a race that mattered to him. It makes me think that the fable was probably written to encourage people to keep working hard back in the times of the industrial revolution when steady effort mattered more, not gray matter or free, independent thinking. In the long run, it seems to tell us, the slow and steady win. But as the Nobel laureate Bob Dylan pointed out, the times they are a’ changing and we need our own fable — one that encourages people to also work smart for what they are passionate about. And it’s not just about disruptive innovation and ideas that the start-ups of today epitomize. Even the corporates are now fostering a work smart culture.

It was only when I found my passion in Development Sector (public health, to be precise) that I realized what the alignment of your passion with the mission that you are trying to drive does. Up until then, I was driven primarly by external motivators of fear and validation from society, and that can only take you a short distance. When you follow your heart, you are able to accomplish what you are proud to call your life’s work, in your work life. It becomes a lot easier then to have the patience, perseverance and persistence, required to excel and create something of everlasting value. I rejoice in giving my best against overcoming the challenges at my job like bureaucracy, slowness and politically charged — despite having left my banking job for very similar reasons.

External motivators of fear and validation can only take you so far. To tap into your internal motivators, you need to follow your heart and work towards something that you are passionate about.

To me, DareDreamers are people who dare to dream and follow their dreams with zeal and a never-say-die spirit; a very important distinction from day dreaming. They face and overcome any challenges and obstacles, of which there are always plenty, driven by their love, passion and belief in the value that their efforts help create and what they stand for.

Stupid: 1

The pressures of not being one and the perks of being one

Chapter 1: The Middle-Age Dilemma

His kind neighbor invites him and his wife for a conversation over tea and some pakodas. He wonders how grown up he must appear now to be receiving such invites — like he had only seen his dad receive so far. Mentally, he believes, he and his wife are both still kids – at least when they are in the comfort space of being with just each other.

He was 34 years old but still got carded on a good day at bars — something that always made him smile. Especially when his younger friends or colleagues were not carded. But secretly he also worried that it is probably obvious to the bartender that he is the senior most in the group and the one who is going to settle the check. He couldn’t discount the possibility that it was a trick of the trade to butter him up for a generous tip.

As he tells his wife for the seventy thridiculous time that she looks good, he hypothesizes that this feeling of being “still young”, probably stems from not having kids of their own. Nothing makes you more grown up than having a life to care for which is completely dependent on you for survival. But they didn’t want kids — each for a different reason, but he was glad that this was not a department they had to discuss, deliberate and arrive at a consensus about.

He ties his hair into a short pony and wears his slippers, ‘Are you going to go like this?’ his wife asks.

‘Why? What’s wrong with this?’ He stares down at his black t-shirt and blue denim shorts.

‘Nothing,’ she says. ‘Just that you are not 25 anymore.’

‘Sad, but true,’ he says as he picks up his house keys. ‘Let’s go.’

But his mind is now taking a plunge, receding into the questions that were already forming in there and were crystalized by his wife’s comment: why does he want to be young? Why does he not want to feel his rightful age?

Media, he hypothesizes, as they walk to their neighbour’s house. And the society at large. They value youth way more than middle age. But he doesn’t understand why. As a youth, not very many years ago, he was stupid. He had no sense of what he wanted and no money to buy the things he was being sold by the media (PS3, an iPad, a car). Why then? Is middle age not a better segment to target? Certainly they have more purchasing power and disposable income — he remembers the terms from his economics classes not very many years ago.

But he cannot imagine media celebrating a middle age man with a pot belly who can actually buy those ridiculous pointy shoes and over priced t-shirts. It’s not sexy enough for media. And it’s nonsense for the middle age man to buy things that are made in India or eastward still, but carry the mark of a brand from the west.

His wife stands behind him and asks him to ring the bell. He is used to this charade now. He shuffles and moves to stand behind her. She smacks him on the shoulder, mutters how he always makes her do uncomfortable things, and rings the bell.

Maybe the youth is also valued exactly because they don’t have as much sense, he thinks. Catch them young, while they are still stupid. Impress them when they are impressionable and hope they carry the nonsense ideas lodged in their unformed brains to their graves. He shakes his head, sympathizing for the youth. He then thinks that seniors don’t even get space apart from a footnote, perhaps, in the media. He sympathizes with them too.

Feeling the power of his middle-aged awesomeness, he shakes his neighbors’ hand confidently. ‘Good evening,’ he manages without stuttering or feeling the fatigue of interaction with an unfamiliar human being.

The woman brings the tea cups in a tray and the man brings the pakodas. ‘I made them,’ he declares. The kids, around 14 and 9 years old, join the adults.

It is mighty awkward to be the middle of the pack, he thinks. The neighbors were more middle aged than him and his wife, and they were more middle aged than the kids.

The adults in the room talk about how they have tea and pakodas, just the rain is missing. And also laugh at this.

He realizes he feels more comfortable talking to the kids, perhaps because they seem familiarly lost and confused. He was like that not very many years ago. He is able to relate. As opposed to the self assured, calmer, more middle-aged-than-him folks in the room.

He tries to pick up a conversation with the elder of the two kids. The only conversation that he can think of is the one that he had as a kid with adults, not very many years ago. ‘What’s your plan after school?’ he asks, feeling a sense of deja vu, but from a whole another perspective.

Accustomed to the question from middle aged folks, the 14 year old responds casually, ‘Judge.’

He is intrigued by the response, since he was expecting engineer or doctor — the options he chose between at random when responding to the question, flipping a coin in his mind, not very many years ago. Over the years, he has heard that lawyer is also fast becoming normal choice for children. So he decides to ask the kid, ‘Why?’

‘Mom says I am very judgmental,’ the kid says, looking at his worn out flip flops, ‘I thought I should put it to some use.’

His first thought is to explain to the kid that being a judge means the exact opposite of that. He wonders how, without sounding sarcastic, should he tell the kid that he’s being stupid. Maybe he can tell him that he’s a stupid the world needs with there being only a limited number of judges and all. And for good measure, he can also throw some wisdom around how the quality of the reason why you pick anything in life has no bearing on how good or bad you eventually are at it. He finds himself wishing someone had told him that when he was growing up. But then he worries that he shouldn’t project.

His second thought is that it’s not really the kid’s fault to misunderstand that being judgmental is not a judge’s job description. Language is stupid. How can judgmental be the opposite of what is required of a judge? He wonders whether they actually ran out of words in English language or were they being lazy when they were thinking of a negative adjective for passing quick and overtly critical judgment. It’s neither, actually, he realizes as he thinks of alternate options that do exist for judgmental like prejudiced. He then wonders why is it that these options are not cool enough to be as popular as judgmental. He finds himself thinking of cooler options that could stick. A wacky new word, like zingy, maybe? He thinks this could really catch-on. Don’t be so zingy when your mother talks about Big Boss Season seventy thridiculous. But zingy has the potential to become the kind of bad-ass that people sometimes want to be. Like how the heroes of Bollywood glorified being a tapori in the 90s. Like how the anti-hero is sometimes more alluring than a straight-as-an-arrow hero.

His third thought is that he is the one who is stupid. In all probability, this kid knows all that already and in one short sentence he took a dig at his mom, the worn out flip-flop and the cliched question. He is glad that at least he has realized that he needs to be careful to not let people find out about his own stupidity. Breathing a sigh of relief, that earns him a confused stare from his wife, he thinks about all the pressure that he has to be under to hide his stupidity. He can physically feel his confidence of a few minutes ago leave him and be replaced by the same old anxiety. He smiles. The reassurance of an old foe is sometimes better than the novelty of a new friend.

He wonders how the kid is really smart and inches a little towards understanding why the media celebrates the youth. He blows in his tea cup to push the layer of milk skin away so that he can take a sip. It’s sweet — the way he used to like it not very many years ago. Now he calls it death in a cup. His cooler, more anglicized friends, call it chai-halwa. But that’s for another chapter.

To read the next chapter, go here.

Stupid

The pressures of not being one and the perks of being one

Chapter 1 (? — perhaps, depends on your response, honestly speaking — this doesn’t mean I am dishonest when I don’t explicitly call it out. I don’t know why people say half the things they do, but they do and so do I.)

Our kind neighbor invites me and my wife for a conversation over tea and some pakodas. We wonder how grown up we must appear to the external world, because mentally we are both still kids – at least when we are in the comfort space of being with just each other.

My hypothesis is that this feeling of being “still young”, stems from not having kids of our own. Nothing makes you more grown up than having a life to care for which is completely dependent on you for survival. But (I like starting sentences with that and you should feel free to crucify me at the altar of grammar if you feel so inclined) I cannot discount the role of media and the society at large that values youth way more than middle age. Can’t even feel bad properly about that though. Seniors don’t even have a space apart from a footnote, perhaps, so my sympathies.

To build a hypothesis within a hypothesis, I am truly surprised as to why the youth is celebrated as much as it is? As a youth, not very many years ago, I was stupid. I had no sense of what I want and no money to buy the things I was being sold by the media (PS3, an iPad, a car). Why then? Is middle age not a better segment to target? Celebrate that middle age man with a pot belly who can actually buy those ridiculous pointy shoes and over priced t-shirts that are made in the factory (hopefully) opposite your house but carries the mark of a brand you are conditioned to value. Nonsense, isn’t it?

But maybe the youth is valued exactly because they don’t have much sense. You want to impress them when they are impressionable and hope they carry the nonsense ideas lodged in their unformed brains to their graves. It’s a good grand-plan by smart people, I have to admit. Took me a while to understand. Conspiracy theory from a cynical mind? Maybe.

But sometimes I am truly glad that I am still stupid.

Coming back to the tea and pakoda conversation.

It is mighty awkward to be the middle of the pack. The neighbors are more middle aged than us. We are more middle aged than their kids.

The adults in the room talk about how we have tea and pakodas, just the rain is missing. And also laugh at this.

I realize I feel closer to the kids, perhaps because they seem familiarly lost and confused. I was like that not very many years ago. I am able to relate. As opposed to the self assured, calmer, more middle-aged-than-me folks in the room.

I pick up a conversation with the elder of the two kids. The only one I know, having been in the same situation not very many years ago, What’s your plan after school?

Accustomed to the question from middle aged folks, the 14 year old responds casually. Judge, he says.

Now I am intrigued by the response. I am more accustomed to hearing engineer or doctor. Lawyer is also fast becoming normal. So I ask, Why?

Mom says I am very judgmental, he says, looking at my worn out flip flops, I thought I should put it to some use.

My first thought is to explain to the kid that being a judge means the exact opposite of that. I think of how, without sounding sarcastic, should I tell the kid that he’s being stupid. Maybe I can tell him that he’s a stupid the world needs (because there are limited judges). And also that the quality of reason why you pick anything in life has no bearing on how good or bad you eventually are at it. I wish someone had told me that when I was growing up. But I shouldn’t project.

My second thought is that it’s not really his fault. Language is stupid. How can judgmental be the opposite of what is required of a judge? I can’t believe they ran out of words and chose the nearest one. I think of alternate options for judgmental like prejudiced that are somehow not cool and haven’t been as popular as judgmental. A cooler option could be a wacky new word, like zingy, maybe– I think this could really catch-on. Don’t be so zingy when your mother talks about Big Boss Season seventy thridiculous. But zingy has the potential to become the kind of bad that people sometimes want to be. Like how our heroes glorified being a tapori in the 90s. Like anti-hero is sometimes more alluring than a too-straight hero.

My third thought is that I am the one who is stupid. In all probability, this kid knows that and in one short sentence he took a dig at his mom, my flip-flop and my cliched question.

Makes sense then to celebrate the youth, I think.

An Ode To The Shawshank Redemption

Theatrical release poster for The Shawshank Redemption

Disclaimer: This post contains spoilers to The Shawshank Redemption. If you haven’t seen the movie, please do that first – it’s awesome!

My favorite scene in the movie is when Andy is suddenly missing from his cell and the jail guards are looking everywhere to find out where he has vanished until the warden discovers the tunnel that he’s dug out of his cell.

That’s the scene in which the big reveal of his perseverance over the last 20 odd years where he chiseled at his cell wall with a little rock hammer until he had dug a tunnel out. He planned, he stuck with the plan, he worked hard towards his goal bit by bit, everyday. There’s a lesson here for not giving up, there’s a lesson here for hope, but these are not the ones I want to talk about.

Now, this is the very definition of long term gratification to my mind. A more gangster personality with more swagger would have used a more instant gratification route like blowing the wall with a dynamite.

It’s a little unsettling to think that he spent 20 years of his life trying to break out of his jail cell; to think that it’s a life wasted. That he could have done so many better things if he would have been out, free.

And I agree. But the starting point of this is once he’s already landed in a jail. Now what? He can’t get out just because he wants to. What should he do then? Holding on to the hope of being free someday actually helped him not go insane. He carried out his prison duties with aplomb — in fact, he ‘exceeded expectations’ on those almost without fail!

And that’s where the story becomes so powerful in terms of carrying this metaphor for the everyday life. Keep being optimistic and hopeful and you may someday realize your life’s long term dreams, even if they seem unrealistic today — when you are at the start of the journey. Keep chipping away slowly at that wall that stands between you and your goal. But at the same time, the fact that you know you are working towards that long term goal, lets you give yourself that chance to enjoy the other things along the way — like an assignment or project at work, perhaps. You might even find the joy in doing this because you are calm for having made a little progress for your long term dream — whatever it is.

For me, it’s writing.

I started working on my second novel, DareDreamers: A Start-up of Superheroes, soon after the first one got published in August 2011. Exactly 7 years later, the second novel is being released next month. The joy that I experienced when I held the advance copies in my hand was no less than when Andy gets out of the prison — which is the moment caputred in the poster above.

I often fall trap to the idea of evaluating my life and in that mode, I actually gave up writing for several months together in these past seven years. The logical end to the effort of writing is the book getting published and I was inching towards that so slowly that it’s hard to even look at it like progress. These are the thoughts that I needed to fight off:

What’s the point of doing this at night after work or on weekends when I could be chilling!

Everybody’s talking about this new series on Netflix and someone’s going to spoil it for me on Monday.

My friends are catching up at this new pub today. (Ok, that one I probably wouldn’t miss.)

One month is a pretty significant period of time, right? But that’s just 1% of seven years. You can’t even notice that level of movement towards your goal, let alone evaluating if you are even moving in the right direction.

But I am glad that I persevered. Because now I can look back at these seven years and see how much I learned about writing. And the fact that I learned a lot about many other things from the time I spent with my friends and family and at work because I was quietly chipping away at the wall that truly mattered.

And it’s a life well spent.

PS: I’ve been working on finalising the typeset, the cover and the launch plan with my publisher these past few months and that has kept me away from Medium. Now that the book is out of my laptop and on it’s way into the real world (August 15 launch), “I will be back”.

Review: The Sellout by Paul Beatty

Surprisingly, I haven’t read a lot of American fiction. I am not sure why reading in India is not as exposed to American writing, given how much everything else is. Our TV Series, ‘English’ movies are thoroughly American, but our books are very European.

In 2016, when the Booker Prize opened to beyond Commonwealth countries, thankfully for me, widely contested otherwise, Paul Beatty became the first American to receive this award. This book became essential reading for me, for just this reason to start with.

Follow that up with the fact that I could not put the book down when I read it’s premise — a story about reinstatement of racial segregation (deliberate) and slavery (not so much) — the book appealed to me from the back-jacket first and from the first page after. It’s probably the most humorous book that I have read of late, which is how it manages to stay for its entire length, even while dealing with a serious topic.

For me, Hominy (a minor actor from Little Rascals brilliantly allowing juxtaposition of fact and fiction) was the most interesting character followed, closely, by Foy Cheshire. The reason why the book appeals to a non-American audience is largely because of its wit, sarcasm and the constant caustic assault on stereotypes which is refreshing in how unconformable it can sometimes be. The character of Foy Cheshire offers a counter ebb to ‘Bonbon’ Me and Hominy’s attempt of making people and places important through ‘recognizing’ their difference and individuality rather than feigning ignorance through a forced broad-stroke homogeneity — just because race as a subject makes us uncomfortable. While Hominy, an aging, underutilized actor, wants to go back to history and be important again by being a slave — the only societal construct he knows he could be meaningful in, Foy is fastidiously trying to rewrite history by writing African-American versions of famous books (like Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn).

At one point, my favorite in the book, Foy pours white paint down his right side in a moment of temporary insanity — which could be a metaphor for his view of ‘whitening’ of African Americans while African-Americanizing ‘white’ literature. Or it could be to illustrate his opinion of how ‘insane’ the idea of segregation is — which he embodied in that moment of insanity. Maybe it was both, maybe even more.

There’s much else to like (and write about) — the thesis like stand-up comedy routine, the Dum Dum Intellectuals, the bus-driving love interest, the gangsters in the hood, the ideas of a black Chinese restaurant, the crazy experiments of an ‘academic’ father who is homeschooling his son, the idea (and non-sense) of closure — which even the readers are denied in the end.

The book is thought provoking and layered, just as I like my fiction!

I have to admit that there are a ton of references in the book that I did not get. It’s a novel that deserves a dedicated course on it — there’s a lot to be ‘googled’ on every page. I started doing that but it got very tiring after a point. I will, however, revisit this book again when I can read it at a more leisure pace. This, to me, is the only drawback of the novel — it felt like it wasn’t written for me — which is nothing to take away from its brilliance, but makes me feel ‘segregated’ in its reading.

Do you have the time?

Understanding the limited nature of our most valuable resource

Do you know how many hours are there in a year? I am sure you can calculate, but do you know it?

It’s 8,760. Not a lot, is it?

Situation Analysis

I used to think that there are 30 million seconds in a year and there’s a lot that can be done in that time. And that’s true when you are young. There’s more time than you care for in a year. You seem to spend an eternity between two birthdays and can’t wait to be a year older and get the next set of gifts. You can’t seem to have enough friends, or enough things to do to kill all the time that you have in a day or a week or a month or a year.

But for me, that changed as I grew older.

It might be because of the Internet, which led to explosion of content that we have access to. There’s never a dull moment in our days now. There almost always is something to read or watch. We are struggling to prioritize time for people we care for because there are so many good movies, TV shows and books that we haven’t seen or read yet.

But aside from the internet, I think it might also be that once you grow up, you have a lot more responsibilities and a list of things that you have to do that never seems to get over. It either keeps growing, or refreshing itself with new items. Time, in this setting, becomes the most limiting factor in doing the things that you know make sense for you to be doing.

When I found myself struggling to do as much as I wanted to do, or rather had to do, the limitation of time as a resource in my life started sinking in. I immediately understood that I need a more reasonable number than 30 million seconds, which seems like a lot, but is actually not much.

30 million seconds is actually just about 500,000 minutes. Now we know how quickly the minutes pass. Ideally, I would have liked to have half-hour unit measures, because I am at a stage in life where I can track a 30-minute period easily. But that complicates the math, so I decided to stick with hours.

For simplicity, I will round 8,760 to 8,500. That’s almost 2 weeks taken out of the year. Let’s say it’s imperative to travel for that amount and get out of your other commitments while at it as well.

Just about 8,500 hours between two birthdays.

But that’s not all available to do the things that we want / have to do.

We need to take out sleeping time, to start with. At 7 hours/day, you sleep for 2,500 hours. That leaves you with, around 6,000 waking hours.

You have a chill job? That’s 9–10 hours a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks knocks about 2,500 hours from that leaving you with about 3,500 hours. If you are commuting to work one hour each way, that’s another 500 hours gone.

We also take about 500 hours in a year recovering after a long day at work. For simplicity, let’s say that this includes all the time you take to discuss your work or people at work, the successes and the struggles with your friends and family. And the time when you go for after work parties with colleagues to vent or plan or strategise.

We are now left with about 2,500 hours.

Then, there are household chores and several societal obligations (least annoying of which are taking a bath and shaving everyday) which take away at least another 500–1000 hours in a year.

The remainder is just about 1500–2000 hours.

That’s not little, I hear you say. That’s like 60–80 days!

Theoretically only.

If we were able to access all this time together, we could indeed do so much more than we currently do with our time. But, alas, that’s not to be. Most of the times, we get these hours in small batches, which is not efficient although, arguable, necessary. Apart from the long vacations that one takes, at least 20% of this time is lost due to the inefficiencies of build-up towards starting something, transitioning from one activity to another, or simply interruptions.

For example, when you are reading a book and someone sends you a Whatsapp text or worse still — calls!, it takes some time in getting back to the zone on the book, correct?

We are now looking at a little over 1200–1400 hours.

30 to 60 minutes on social media every day? That’s 200 to 400 hours gone.

I think it’s safe to say that we have just about 1,000 hours in a year that we can make count for all things important to us.

Problem Statement

How should we be using these 1000 hours judiciously?

Approaching solutions

Solution to this of course needs to be individualized and there can’t be one answer to this.

But the approach can be similar. So, to start, let’s make a list of things that you want to do. For me, this included: writing, reading books, movies, TV series, and staying up to date on events in India and around the world.

I decided to spend about an hour a day on news. That’s close to 300 hours in the year. 30% of the time.

I decided to read 20 books in a year. The kind of books I read and the pace at which I read them takes me around 7 hours on an average to complete one. So that, 140 hours. 14–15% of the time.

I decided to workout for 30 minutes daily since I could not do longer workouts on alternate days. For me, it’s easy to sustain a momentum but very difficult to turn the ignition on again. It’s easier if I have a time carved out for this on a daily basis. So that’s about 150 hours in a year for workout.15% of the time.

I want to watch one movie every week, more or less. So that’s 50 movies in a year. Let’s say 20 of these would be at the theater, which takes about 4 hours each, taking 80 hours overall. 30 would be at home, taking about 70 hours. 150 hours. Another 15%.

I would like to see a few TV series too. GoT, Fargo, Stranger Things, Daredevil, Jessica Jones... If I want to cap series watching at 10% of the time, I can see only about 100 hours in the whole year. That’s about 10 seasons of 10 episodes each (50–60 minute format). I think I see a lot more than that, and there’s definitely room for improvement.

Left with just about 150 hours where we can choose to do what we want. For me, it’s the little time that’s left for writing. For people who like to read more or travel more, this is the available buffer where that time comes from.

It’s very little time if you consider that it’s less than 30 minutes per day. We need to be careful to not waste this time on things that are not productive. And even worse would be to spend this time on things that are draining, leaving you with lower energy to do things that you simply must do. It’s imperative to avoid being sucked into things that are a drain your time and energy. Identify these time and energy sinks and systematically weed them out of your life.

11 Things That, Simply, Make Sense

If You’ve Decided To Be, To Do Or Not Do Is The Next Logical Question

We spend a large chunk of our lives stressing about things that either are important to us or should be important to us. A lot of the stress is also over deciding what is truly important and what is not.

I normally am very vary of absolutes, but of late, I’ve realized that it’s also important to identify some of the absolutes so that you can focus your limited time, energy and mindspace on things that do not necessarily have absolutes. This list is my attempt at explaining 11 such absolutely good things that everyone must, simply, do.

One of the reasons why you read articles like this, even though once you have read them, you end up thinking — I already knew that! — is that you need to be reminded about the importance of things that you know you should be doing but find hard to stick to.

Typically, You plan →(loss)→You try some of them →They are hard →(loss) → You drop them. I’ve been guilty of that too.

Why does that happen? Here’s something that I recently realized:

The Activation Barrier Theory

I am a chemical engineer (only by training) and it’s a fairly common concept in chemistry. What it means is this:

Activation Barrier, or Activation Energy, is the energy barrier that a bunch of reactants must overcome in order to react with each other. It’s the energy which a chemist would need to supply to the reactants if he wants the reaction to happen.

Just take a quick glance at the black line (the without catalyst one) in image below:

Source: Wikipedia

What this chart basically means is that to go from energy level X to energy level Y, the reactants need more energy than just (Y-X). They basically need to go over a hill to attain the higher final state of energy.

How this translates into (non-chemical) life is that while you know that you’ll be more content (or peaceful, different from happiness) after doing something that you know is important, it seems difficult or energy consuming to start doing it.

Simple enough, right?

Alright, so let’s complicate this a little. Let’s look at the red line now:

Source: Wikipedia

When you add a catalyst to the reaction, it helps lower the Activation Energy barrier making it a little easier than before to make the reaction happen.

As per it’s chemical definition,

A catalyst itself does not undergo any change. It’s role is just to precipitate the series of events that lead to the reaction and hence the higher state of energy.

The good news in all that is that once you have the catalyst, it stays with you forever. You can use it over and over again, without a worry!

Although I am sure you understand why should you aspire to get to Y from X, it’s probably worth spending a few seconds on that. Y is the state in which you know you are living life a little fuller than at X. It’s the level at which you are able to rise above the mundane worries, characterized by the daily struggles, and are able to focus on things that are truly important.

If that’s vague, picture this. At X, people tend to be inward looking. They are net takers. They need more than they can give. They need to live for themselves for their survival.

On being elevated to Y, the same people are suddenly net givers. Of course everyone needs support, love and help. But these people are secure enough to give more than they need. There’s an increased mental bandwidth to feel empathy, which is the genesis of understanding more about the people and the world around you and getting out of the limited ideas and agendas that you might have had at X. At Y, people become truly capable of being constructive. With their enhanced understanding of the world, they can constructively challenge the status quo where it is needed (as opposed to merely cribbing about it behind the veil of learned cynicism or applauding for junk in learned obedience — both of which are detrimental) and actually do something to fix it.

The most important thing, however, is that when you are at level Y you will start being able to mentor people around you as well. This allows you to be the catalyst in their journey from X to Y. And that could be the start of a chain reaction that the world needs.

Picture a bunch of X-people. They do their jobs, they are economically engaged. They have a positive contribution in the world in economical terms. But since a lot of their energy is spent in self-preservation, their net output is less than what they are individually capable of (due to, what I like to call, some destructive interference):

∑X < X1+X2+X3…

Now picture yourself being surrounded by more and more Y-people. The thoughts and ideas that you exchange, the things that you work on together, would start being more than the sum of your individual contributions and even capabilities. That’s true collaboration.

∑Y > Y1+Y2+Y3…

That’s inter-personal synergies coming into play. That’s a world that I would want to live in. And that’s why it’s important to summit that bloody Activation Barrier Mountain.

Now that we understand this conceptually, let’s take a look at the 11 things that you know are most definitely important and understand what catalysts can help lower the activation barrier to help us go over to the higher state of existence.

1. Less Mindless Consumption

This is probably the most important item on the list. Mindless Consumption means when you are just gorging on unrealistic romcoms or brainless comedies. Anything that’s effortless and does not stimulate your mind, really. While reading is generally more engaging an activity than watching, it is possible to mindlessly consume books as well.

Source: Ultralightandcomfortable.com

I’ll take a little digression here to share my disgust over content that celebrates everything that’s wrong with the world in the name of senseless comedy or entertainment. Movies and books are powerful tools that help shape people’s imagination and if they are replete with misogyny or white supremacy, they tend to subconsciously make these things OK for people who are anyway required to (a) suspend their disbelief, or, (b) leave their minds in the refrigerator when they are just chilling out at the end of a long day/week/weeks.

Coming back, I do understand the value of mindless consumption. On occasion, it helps you relax and clear your head. When you are really stressed out, you need this to have some semblance of normalcy. But it’s like smoking. You know it’s injurious to health, but you still don’t/can’t seem to stop.

But stop, you must. (#inneryoda)

How? (#innerluke)

When we indulge in Mindless Consumption, beyond just for relief, and realize that we are doing something crappy, we tend to seek external validation to normalize it and to assuage any guilt arising from the pleasure so that we can continue to binge.

If your parents, spouse or roommates join you in, for example, it’s easy to make an event or a celebration out of it. Like when you watch Friends for the 20th time with your wife. If the whole society joins in — it’s made even easier. Like when you read Chetan Bhagat or EL James because everyone is reading it.

One of the simpler ways to reduce Mindless Consumption is by doing it alone or on a personal screen (phone, tablet or PC) with headphones. That way, you are at least not doing this in common areas of your house. If you live with parents, or a spouse, or roommates, they’ll not get sucked in and it’ll at least save their time. Since you can’t match mindless consumption time tables, try and make sure that you are not getting sucked into doing it when you have the energy to actually be doing something useful instead. Additionally, if people don’t get sucked in, you are not celebrating watching junk.

For social media, stop all notifications. Open the app when you really want to. Let it not lure you in whenever your “friend” shares a cat video. For books, read the first chapter before you decide to buy or borrow. Don’t let peer pressure be the dominating force in influencing what you read.

It’s true that mass consumption of a thing starts defining the culture around you (Murakami, Norwegian Wood — not an exact quote). But if everyone around you is watching/reading the same fresh from the gutter, brainless, prose-less, or misogynistic movie/tv series/book — you are better off not being a part of that culture.

2. More mindful consumption

Mindful or deliberate consumption is important.

When you engage in mindless consumption, try and be aware of what it means to the society and what it might be doing to you, sub-consciously. If you catch it trying to plant a crap-bomb in your brain, warn others by writing a scathing review on your social media page. Which would be time well spent on social media instead of scrolling through your endless wall / feed.

But much better would be to be selective in what you watch and read. There’s more content out there than we can possibly consume and it’s critical to prioritize. Fads die out, so just get through Monday at work when people discuss the crappy Friday release and you’ll be fine.

But the prioritized, important content it’s not always the easiest to consume. And that’s because it is demanding attention and focus from your brain.

This seemingly Catch-22-ish situation can be resolved by the same tool that reduces Mindless Consumption. Watch these movies on a big screen at home and rope in your parents/spouse/roommate/feiends. Subscribe to websites, magazines, and other content that makes you smarter. Pay for these subscriptions, if you can, so that you feel a little more driven to actually read them.

It also helps if you can discuss these things with like minded people. Join a book club or a movie screening club or a live performance club. It gets you out of your home to a nice cafeteria or a small theater where you meet new and interesting people over beverages who encourage you to be a better versions of yourself.

It’s cool to be introverted, but there are some social interactions that help you get to Y and are hence necessary. If you are thoroughly engaged, these interactions stop feeling like a chore and start enriching your life. But the first step is to accept that you need people — Smart People — in your life. Being a loner might leave you with your half-baked ideas and thoughts. Bounce them off of Smart People and they’ll get enriched. You also help them, similarly.

Writing reviews on Goodreads, IMDB, or even on your blog is a great idea after you have found something meaningful. It helps you form your thoughts about what you’ve Mindfully Consumed. It also helps revisit your experience on-demand, several years later when you might have forgotten what it was exactly about. And it, hopefully, is your bit to pull the society in a direction that’s better than mindless consumption.

This brings us neatly to our third thing that, simply, makes sense:

3. Investing in Long Term Gratification (LTG) and avoiding whatever’s Instant

Sort of relates to both 1 and 2, but there’s more to it and this is why it merits it’s own section. The inter-linkages are deep enough for me to not stress a lot over untangling them, so if you want this to read as 1+2, instead of 3, be my guest. That’s accidentally smart placement.

Instant gratification is one of the motivators for Mindless Consumption. Especially on social media. Instead of working on a comprehensive idea, it’s so easy to spit it out in 140 characters, right? Or to just watch 60 second cat videos for tickling that funny bone. At 3:40 AM.

Even when you are posting something elsewhere, that “Send” button actually comes in the way of telling a complete story. It’s always lurking on the side, teasing you to stop the effort and see what your friends think. You lurk for hours after posting something, waiting for likes, comments and reactions. That’s instant gratification.

Also, given the nature of our impatient society, any discussion or debate needs to happen in the now. The moment there’s a breaking news, we are expected to have an opinion. There’s added pressure because there’s not likely to be a discussion on this tomorrow (or in a week) — so point in forming a solid, well researched opinion on anything.

As a result, however, we have ‘instant experts’. Demonetization in India on 8th November 2016, for example, saw a sudden surge of a billion plus economists with strong opinions for or against, whatever they were batting for. Like instant noodles, they put their brain through boiling FB posts and WhatsApp shares to be ‘ready’. I am sure there were people on the evening of November 8 who, when asked about their opinion, said three words that shunted them into anonymity forever (also known as ‘that weekend’), “I don’t know.” Or maybe it was “Gotta read up.”

Subscribing to religious or political ideologies, similarly, without constructively challenging them comprises what I earlier called ‘learned obedience’. To have a bias against them without understanding it is 'learned cynicism’.

Invest in Long Term Gratification by reading more than one opinion — and preferably from both the sides of the argument. You’ll see pros and cons on both sides and you’ll need all your tenacity to avoid being cornered by people into the false binary of ‘good or bad’, in it’s myriad forms. Human beings, not surprisingly, have enough brain power to hold multiple and often conflicting emotions and ideas in their brain simultaneously.

Comprehensive understanding is critical before forming an opinion to ensure that you are not manipulated into thinking what is expected of you, but rather truly believe in whatever you do. Try and find sources that provide a comprehensive series or history of events to avoid being swayed by something that’s just recent or a fad.

To catalyze LTG is damn hard. I am open to finding a better catalyst, but for now the one I have found is to accept being relegated to anonymity among a certain section of people. You might actually like some of them, but it’s important to let your self preservation kick in to avoid being corrupted or beaten into shape till you become a zombie with learned behavior of cynicism or obedience.

The Trickiest 2x2

The 2x2 here is an oversimplification because it tries to bucket people on just two personality defining traits. It’s not, however, unimportant. Most of the people are intelligent, but tend be arrogant about it. Or not very smart, but at least humble. Neither of these is a bad thing and perhaps also a little important to be either a BOP or a HOP. I wouldn’t even say that to be saint-like is an important life goal or the ideal state. What I will say, however, is that it makes sense to be careful around DFs, or avoid them altogether, even if they throw great parties.

Facts and information are not knowledge until they have passed through your mental filters and are processed. Once processed, the knowledge makes you smarter in the long run. So investing in LTG, simply, makes sense.

And again, we neatly progress to the 4th thing that, simply, makes sense:

4. Being Curious and Learning New Things (some that, simply, make sense)

1, 2, and 3 together help you focus on learning new things. It means that you need to be forever curious and have the guts to question the accepted normal.

Why is not doing being curious a problem? Sitting in my office one day, where the majority demographic (with just a couple of exceptions) was men from Delhi, I was surprised when someone pointed it out to me. Once we understood that it was problem, we consciously tried to make effort to fix that. Things could have gone on with the inertia that most things have and we would have probably not even know what we were missing. But when we fixed our hiring, it was abundantly clear what was being missed.

We tend to put our blinds on, never digging beyond the superficial, and it, simply, makes sense to do a little more than that. If you are questioning the accepted normal, you’ll see many things that the world can do without and many more that it needs to be a better version of itself. The Y-world, so to speak.

Being curious also points to picking up new things. While a lot of people will tell you that it’s better to pick up marketable skills, like a data science course on Coursera or doing a bachelor’s degree in psychology through correspondence, I believe that it’s OK to pick up non-marketable skills as well. Cooking, for example (disclaimer, I haven’t tried it yet). Or ironing clothes (recently mastered).

But if you are so far down in this article, you probably already got this one covered. ;)

5. Working Out

I am not going to bore you with how a healthy mind resides in a healthy body. Of course you know that. But you often forget it, so that let that be a not-very-cleverly-veiled reminder.

What I will explain, however, is that exercise (any physical activity) or training (physical activity with an end goal) helps in dissipating some of the negative energy that we all have. Negative energy increases your activation barriers for most of the other things that you, simply, must do. If allowed to accumulate, this negative energy has the potential to set you into a downward spiral, which nobody needs. It’s, hence, important to also think working out as a small sacrifice for a greater good for people who are likely to not think of it as being particularly important for them in isolation.

Working out also releases serotonin and dopamine in your body and can increase the sense of general well being, thereby, reducing stress and anxiety. Your social interactions improve and, provided that you are doing the other 10 things too, allowing you to start being a proactive Y-version of yourself.

Source: SBR Sport

It’s not easy to overcome the activation barrier to start working out. For me, personally, it’s the hardest one. I haven’t had fitness goals ever in my life so I am struggling to prioritize this one. What, however, did catalyze it for me was when I pulled a muscle while lifting a 20 kg jar of water. Pathetic, right? Guilt over neglecting my fitness for a long time and tangible evidence of my weakness worked like the best catalyst ever.

I think everyone should have fitness goals. Or maybe a minimum standard that they think they should meet. Like being able to walk 10 km on your next vacation without getting so exhausted that you need to head back to sleep. It might be hiking capability. Or jogging 5 km without collapsing. Whatever works.

But that would just be a trigger to start working out. When your whole body hurts the day after a session, it’s hard to keep going every day. How to stay motivated then?

I started making a video log of my work outs to see if the vanity of seeing visible changes in my body helps me stay motivated and I have to confess that it worked. I’ve been regular so far, so I have reason to believe that it’s probably a long term catalyst.

But I feel the need to justify that what might be vanity, is probably a little more than that. Aside from the tangible benefits of a healthy body (picking up 20 kg without pulling a muscle, for starters), the intangible benefits of a healthy body image, coupled with the confidence you feel on account of it, helps in making a daily conscious effort to work out. As with other things that, simply, make sense — at some point, this will become a habit and take you above the hill into the Y-state.

6. Having a caped (or maybe not-caped) alter ego

Having a passion outside your job is probably one of the most critical things to insulate and protect your sanity. In its absence, it’s easy to get carried away with your job related enthusiasm and ambition.

We spend more than 10–12 hours of daily life at our job, on an average. If you add the commute, that might be higher. Then add the fact that you have a push-email configured on your phone so you are notified of any action instantaneously. The ping and the blinking light on the phone keeps pulling you back into your job-world.

In a 24 hour day, if you sleep for 7 hours on an average, you are spending more than 75% of your awake time engaged with your job. Let’s say that your daily chores take-up another 5-10% of your time. If you are in a relationship or a marriage, a minimum of 10% should be invested in that. That leaves you with 5–10%. And weekends, of course.

This small remainder of time for yourself is what’s responsible for mindless consumption and also adds to the activation barrier. If I have only about an hour or two each day, I need that to unwind. Right?

Now, catalyzing this is not too hard. Most people already know what they are passionate about. If you don’t, it’s not that hard to find. Especially if you are consuming mindfully, being curious and meeting more people, you are sure to discover it no time.

The coolest thing about following your passion is that once you start devoting time and energy to it, the improved energy levels, excitement and the joy you feel in its pursuit, keep propelling you forward.

If you have something pressing to go to, you tend to make time for it. Gradually, the 5–10% time could become 10–15% once you try and optimize all the demands that the world makes on your time to squeeze out more for your passion.

This also has a cascading benefit. (a) A passion is probably the best way to blow out steam that does not involve spoiling your health. (b) It’s something that keeps you mindful while you are at it. (c) It also lets out any negative energy that you’ve been accumulating at work. And most importantly, (d) it tempers your ambition because your energy is now split between two important things.

How does (d) help? There are several things that happen in a typical workplace. And as with most worldly things, with the good comes the inevitable bad. There’s politics, there’s power play, there are turf wars. In short, a miniature Game of Thrones with a metaphorical Iron Throne that everyone wants to sit on till they realize that it’s not a comfortable chair at all. The bloody iron seat will hurt your bum and the back-rest is old rusted swords. Can’t imagine it to be comfortable.

Coming back, if you’ve limited energy left, you might be kind of forced to not worry about the less important and mostly negative things. Negative things are energy sinks. They dampen your morale and you might start imagining your job as a battle that you don’t want to fight. And then, you want to move on. It’s a vicious cycle.

If you change, ‘I want get promoted next year’ or ‘I want to earn more than person P’ or ‘I want to be the division head in 3 years’ or ‘I want to be a/the CEO in 15 years’ with ‘I want to be damn good at what I do so that I can continue to pay the bills and more and be able to pursue my passion’, it lets you focus more on the real ‘why I do what I do’. That, feeds back into your work and a happy-you does better work than a disgruntled-you. So in effect, taking your eye off the game, just a tad, might actually be good in the long run.

The graphic below helps illustrate the same.

Source: Adapted from Wait But Why

7. Save Diligently

Another, simply, sensible thing you should be doing.

Your lifestyle needs to be a notch below your income level. There are all sorts of rule-of-thumbs out there that are designed to create an ecosystem of heightened consumerism.

‘Paying 25% of your salary on rent is OK’. No, it’s not OK. Unless you can’t help it, help it.

‘Buy a house worth 5X of your salary’. No. Buy it only if you can find a house that’s 30-50 times your annual rent.

And many more.

Source: Forbes

Your savings are your cushion to fall back on. A reduced dependence on a job goes a long way in being a little stress free.

Insecurity about anything is likely to keep you at X. Being financially secure is something that’s in your control. Even if you are consciously working towards it, it helps in operating at Y. Hence, it just, simply, makes sense.

Plan an early retirement with not the most lavish, but with a good enough lifestyle. That way, you have your bases covered. Worst case scenario, you can still live a good life. Once you have your retirement corpus, and you don’t feel like retiring, you can start gradually upping your lifestyle. Not before.

To catalyze this, plan your monthly expenses conservatively and invest the rest of your salary every month. Out of sight, out of mind. This makes sure that you don’t have any money for impulsive purchases or for splurging. Keep a buffer amount for exigencies, but don’t tap into it for a non-exigency.

8. Giving Back

Sounds selfless right. It is. But it also benefits you in turn.

You can give back in one of many ways, including but not limited to donations, charity, volunteering, mentoring, sharing what you know and are learning, etc.

When you give back, you are investing in shaping a world that you want to see around you. If you genuinely care, as most actually do, you are not just being shallow when you crib in frustration over the sad state of affairs in the world on several counts. Poverty, healthcare access, access to education, racism, sexism, global warming, politics of hate, refugee crisis, whatever gets your goat (metaphorically, of course), do something about it. If you have time, that’s the best contribution you can make. Clean up your neighborhood. Mentor kids in your neighborhood and juniors in your office. Volunteer with an organization that’s doing something impactful for a cause that you believe in.

When you read about things still being wrong/bad, you will be sad. But you will also be proud of doing your bit. But there’s more to it.

In the pie of misery, you’ll see a sliver of hope. You’ll meet very smart, motivated people who are working on solving the problems that get your goat. Through them, you’ll be exposed to many more. You’ll know what needs to be done to fix the problem a little better and that gives you optimism.

Optimism is the energy source that cynicism is the sink for…

… and that gets you closer to Y.

9. Meditating

The purpose of meditation is thoughtless awareness which helps you clear your mind. Blanking the mind takes effort and practice, but works more or less like a shutting down your over heated computer. A lot of problems are solved because a shut down clears up the cache, frees up the RAM and takes things out of CPU memory, which is essentially the slowest way of processing anything.

Most of the time, our brain has so many open threads at any given point in time that they end-up entangled. Have you ever let out a work frustration on an unrelated issue at home? Or argued with your Uber driver because your boss or client was being an ass that day? That’s because of the entanglement.

I read that brain does clear up a lot of this mess when you sleep, so getting a good sleep is important. But I think sleeping is more like hibernating your computer. It’s not a real shut down. This is because when you are either consciously worrying about something or when there are several unresolved and entangled thoughts floating in your mind’s back, your sleep is hardly as peaceful as it needs to be. This diminishes your ability to resolve new issues in the coming day which leads to even more unresolved, entangled threads.

To break out of this loop, I have found that being consciously thoughtless for 10 minutes a day, goes a very long way.

The purpose of meditating is to learn to live more in the present. It’s like a nice warm-up for mindful living for the rest of your day.

10. Travel

For this one, I don’t have to explain why, I guess. The very tangible benefits of meeting new people, going through new experiences, getting your life juices flowing again are very well understood by almost all.

I want to caution, however, that everyone has varying degree of travel desires and you just need to embrace what’s yours. Not travelling at all is really bad. Traveling a lot, under some sort of peer pressure or for Facebook’s sake is probably equally bad. It doesn’t need to be a life-altering six month long Eat Pray Love travel. It doesn’t need to be Into The Wild like break from the society.

But it does need to be. In the shape and form that makes sense for you.

Travel let’s you leave your familiar circumstances and embrace unfamiliar ones. It forces different parts of your brain to kick in. There’s so much activity in your brain when you travel because it’s like being a kid again. In a new city, or on a new mountain, there’s just so much new information for your brain to process that it’s excitedly abuzz.

This reduces the stress you might be under from your familiar circumstances because you are able to put it on the back-burner it for a while. As a result, your brain’s stress centers also start gradually relaxing.

Once you are back after your travel, you approach problems with a combination of renewed energy and practical application of your newly acquired experiences and skills. You also tend to continue to consciously push out things that might bring the unnecessary stress back. For a while, at least, you sort of live in a bubble of ecstasy.

11. Maintaining a journal

Now this is a logical last thing in the post. A journal, I have found, works wonders in keeping you motivated and to manage your time to help you accomplish the other 10.

I started writing journal as a kid but quickly gave up because writing a page a day seemed like a very daunting ask. It was the only way I knew a journal works. I’ve since found that writing just two to three lines everyday is good enough. A single page of my diary now covers 3–4 days sometimes.

Other days, when you are travelling, for example, you can of course write a lot more than 2–3 lines. But if you don’t feel like prose, write in bullet points.

Woke up at 6:30. Read the newspaper (finally!). Office. Read 42 pages of Exit West in the evening, saw an episode of This Is Us and went for 3K jog. Slept at 11:30.

A great day, right? A journal will motivate you to have more of these.

But that level of detail is sufficient. It helps you record progress against your goals. Motivates to keep reading and logging and working-out and logging and mindfully consuming and logging, etc.

In a world where everyone has become self-centered (and it’s actually not all bad, I think, for it has reduced the number of nosy neighbors and unsolicited opinions and advice from acquaintances) you need to find ways to validate yourself and celebrate winning your own battles. Set up a positive feedback loop for yourself that keeps propelling you.

A journal is good check point for when you lapse. You’ll feel an urge to explain your lazy self of today to your future self who you really owe an answer to. You can’t just keep saying, “I didn’t feel like it today,” for three months, right? That would be so ridiculous that it’ll jump start you into action!

And hence, your journal is also your favorite catalyst. It’s like an early warning indicator of a potential issue and a flywheel with all the momentum you need to keep going on the 10 things that you, simply, must do.

A side benefit is how it works like a Pensieve. When you pick up the journal in 2022, you’ll see how childish you were in 2017 (hopefully, right? We should be more mature a few years in the future). Why was I stressing out about who’ll win more Grand Slams between Federer and Nadal in July? It was so obvious that ________ (*censored for spoilers*) was going to end up in the lead! Ah, that November Goa trip! We had so much fun just relaxing on that kayak in the deep sea for hours. Oh, of course October 18 — when I wrote a blog on Medium in which I mentioned that I’d be reading this journal today.

Now, isn’t that meta!

Ich liebe Ish

A Love Letter for Kazuo IshiguroSource: Indian Express File Photo

The phrase ‘Ich liebe Ish’ translates from German to ‘I love Ish’. Salman Rushdie fondly refers to the man of the moment, Kazuo Ishiguro, as “Ish”. This is, then, a love letter to an author whose works I admire greatly and who just received the 2017 Nobel prize for literature.

When he found out about the recognition, the 62 year old author said he thought, “I am too young for this,” before realising that he was actually somewhere in the middle of the pack, age-wise.

I’ve been following Ishiguro ever since I picked up Never Let Me Go more than a decade ago. He came across as an unjaded and uncomplicated writer, who speaks his richer-than-normal mind with an impressive fluidity. His writings call out to a part in each one of us whose existence we often don’t want to acknowledge. His characters struggle with their interpretation of historical events and their involvement in those. Their inability or fear of confronting the truth impedes an honest introspection. They take a trip down the memory lane which is either blocked off and needs to be reopened or is rendered unreliable with the passage of time. They start out by feeling secure in their beliefs to later discover that they are not as infallible as they imagined. He’s one of the finest writers who explore the idea of an unreliable narrator owing to his mastery over the subtlety the subject requires. Each one of his books is a feat in itself and that is probably why it takes him four years, on an average, to write one.

It’s a very human failing, one that I’ve also been guilty of. Reading him makes me aware of that failing and makes me want to introspect objectively. It forces me to break my defences to reach that gnawing truth. He makes me believe that it’s both easier to do and to digest while it’s still recent. It saves one from building the skyscraper of their lives on a weak foundation which might collapse when it gets older.

Another thing about Ishiguro’s writings is that his evolution as a writer is noticeable. The promise of the little known author of A Pale View of Hills in 1982 was evident. But then with An Artist of the Floating World in 1986, he took the unreliable narrator concept to a whole another height. The Remains of the Day published in 1989 is, to me, the pinnacle of his achievement on the concept. His later books, When We Were Orphans (2000) and Never Let Me Go (2005) are slightly different, with the protagonists searching for their past and origins. The beauty of Never Let Me Go is how organically he extended the same idea to the realm of science fiction, declaring his authentic literary capability to world. People might start reading his works now and I would recommend reading his books chronologically. It’s the best way to read them. It’s not easy to keep improving when you start with near-perfection but he has done exactly that.

There was a seed of worry in my mind when I learned the news: does the award mean that the experts have declared that there’s no room for further improvement for Ishiguro? But on reading his acknowledgement interview, the fear vanished. He called it out himself when he said, “I hope it doesn’t mark some kind of end.” That’s all the assurance that I needed to be safe in my belief that the literary world will continue to be enriched by his writing. He’ll keeping pushing his boundaries as a writer which would, most definitely, lead to evolution of literature itself.

Originally published in Indian Express on October 8, 2017 http://indianexpress.com/article/lifestyle/books/kazuo-ishiguro-a-love-letter-from-a-fan-4880499/