Manage Your Day-To-Day. Edited by Jocelyn K, Glei

All my life, I have been a sucker for books that might effect 'self-improvement'. But there is only so much of even the good stuff you can digest; so during the past few years, I had stopped acquiring this genre and begun to wonder if some of the knowledge had fermented into wisdom. The answer to that question sends me neither into throes of ecstasy, nor slough of despondency. In other words, these books have been useful to a reasonable extent.

Last week I lifted the self imposed moratorium and requested Flipkart for Manage Your Day-To-Day: Build Your Routine, Find Your Focus & Sharpen Your Creative Mind, a collection of articles edited by Jocelyn K, Glei. The title appeared tacky and appeared to signal poverty of promise, but if there is one book that can win the case for never judging a book by its cover, this is it!

The authors recognize that we are individuals and to lay down a template would be naive. Instead, we are offered great insights into what might work and are left to create our own recipe and eventually a full meal.There is an opening section on building a rock-solid routine that reinforces the point that great habits can free us from much of the self-sabotaging tyranny of a poorly thought out routine. There is another section on distractions and I found the chapters on dealing with email, social networking and surfing the net extremely relevant and useful.

It is an insightful and inspirational book. If you find the daily routine too overwhelming to allow you to be creative and to do what you would really like to, the book can get you thinking and started on an entirely different path. One that might head towards your personal goals.

The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison

When I picked up this book, I did not have the slightest clue about the nature or depth of Toni Morrison’s writing. During the many hours I have spent browsing in bookshops, I had seen her novels displayed prominently on the shelves. But for some reason that I cannot retrospectively fathom, I was never nudged strongly enough by my subconscious to pick one up long enough to be dazzled by what lay inside.

And completely, unalterably, irreversibly dazzled is what I am after reading The Bluest Eye! Where were you Ms Morrison, during the past five decades of my engagement with the written word? And where was I?

I

f I were to describe this profound work in simplistic phraseology, this is the story of Pecola, an impoverished and ‘extremely ugly’ African American girl who feels, deeply, that her eminently tragic existence could only be redeemed in some measure if her eyes magically acquire the color blue.

Each sentence is a gift wrapping that promises to reveal yet another surprise. The prose is brilliantly evocative, fearlessly direct and starkly honest. The entire star-cast is ‘black’ and yet among the longest shadows cast on the narrative is by the invisible presence of the ‘white’ people. It will be equally accurate to say that this is a book about ‘race’ and that it is a book not about ‘race.

None of the characters is straining to cover herself or himself with even a shred of glory, and yet we are compelled to understand the fabric of their motivations. No apology is made on anyone’s behalf either– not for Cholly Breedlove for sexually assaulting and impregnating his child, nor for his wife Pauline who fought him with matching violence and yet submitted to him, or the misanthropic Dream Reader Soaphead Church who plotted the murder of his landlady’s aging dog, or the ladies of easy virtue, delightfully named as China and Maginot Line; about the last name, I must confess that my acquaintance with military history did provoke me to wonder why a lady in flesh trade would be named after French defenses that were considered resistant to any breach?

The slim book has an extremely insightful Afterword that Toni Morrison wrote in 1993, nearly three decades after she started writing this book in days that were racially among the most surcharged in the US and 14 years after the book was first published in 1979. It gives the work an even more heightened context.  

A brilliant book!   

Lessons to Live By

A few months ago, as I traveled by train, I pondered over some of the major lessons I have ‘learnt’ during my life. I write the word ‘learnt’ with abundant caution because ‘learnt’ should have the same connotation as ‘completely imbibed and translated into practice’. 

Alas, I cannot even remotely claim such an achievement!

All the same, here are the big lessons (both sublime and ridiculous) that have struck a chord in me:

I am not my Ego.

To awaken and be aware is the only purpose of my life. Living life mindfully and in the Now is the way to do it.

Discipline – delaying gratification and accepting pain first – is the key to solving all of life’s problems.

What you do between stimulus and response becomes you.

When confronted with multiple choices of what to do, do what is good for long-term, even when it is clearly not urgent – especially when it is not urgent!

Nine-tenth of the wisdom lies in being wise in time.

Visualisation, intention and believing in what you seek is the ‘secret’ to getting.

When it comes to money, understand the difference between assets and liabilities. Anything that adds to what you have is an asset. Create assets.

The most important issue for a commander (and we are all commanders of our selves!) is having and constantly re-creating ‘reserves’ Without ‘reserves’ one is only a helpless and reactive tool to evolving circumstances. Reserves are critical to influencing the battle of life.

Not surprisingly, the above two lessons apply as much to health, use of time and relationships, as they do to ‘money’.

In contentious issues, try and visualize the ‘end-game’. Are you prepared for the eventuality? Is it worth the strife? Or is there a better way?

Often ‘acceptance’ of what is is the key to peace and happiness. Acceptance is not surrender. Acceptance is a choice and always calls for wisdom, courage and restraint.

Finish what you begin. Do not allow delays (there never will be a ‘perfect moment’ to start; indeed the business of ‘perfect moment’ is the biggest delusion there is!) and if a deviation occurs, get back on rails quickly.

Hard work – not talent – is the king.

Weight loss is almost entirely a matter of calories. Exercise has great uses for promoting health and increasing basal metabolic rate (BMR) (which assists weight loss) but eventually the dice is loaded in favour of imbibing fewer calories. Eating smaller meals frequently – and never giving your body’s intelligence the impression that you plan to go hungry and hence it needs to store all calories for future use – is part of the trick.

If you wish to write, you need to schedule it and then stick to the schedule. Waiting for inspiration is as likely to succeed as waiting on a beach for a message in a bottle.  

A plan without time-lines, resource allocation and reality check is not a plan.


To read a person solely based on his looks or words is to set yourself up for possible failure, even a trap. While looks and words count, always, always, always judge people by their actions.

Good story telling is about brevity, maintaining suspense and punch-line. It is not about stretching the tale to milk it for as long as one can. To do that is to sound death-knell for the story.

For a presenter – a teacher, a speaker, an actor, an impressionist, a comedian or a singer – the most important element is the audience.The fare should be pitched at the level of most of the audience. To ignore this and rely solely on display of one’s ‘knowledge’ or ‘brilliance’ is to fail.

‘Style and substance’ both matter in life (and in presentations) but the sequence implicit in that expression is flawed; it must always be ‘substance and style’. While you risk being underrated if you lack ‘style’, you can never ever succeed without ‘substance’. Cannot sell a bad product for long merely with good advertising!

Love is the willingness to stretch boundaries of one’s ego to accommodate another, solely for his or her long-term good.

A good movie is a credible story told well. (There! And everyone in Bollywood says there is no formula to make a 'good' film!)

The Weight of my Argument

It isn't hard to lose weight.

I don’t think anyone has ever said that seriously. But as fuzzy and convenient self-deluding assurances go, in many heads this one sits at the top of the ladder. Or why would not so many of us burn with anxiety and jolt ourselves out of gluttonous-lethargic stupor and get going? How many failures will it take for us to realize that the only diet that really works is the one that permanently tilts the ‘calories in’ and ‘calories out’ equation in the favor of the latter?

But maybe you know all of this and more but would simply like to start tomorrow. It is a delightful thought. Just the hint of putting it off for another day sweeps such a wave of false well-being through each of our cells that the strategy becomes compelling beyond challenge. Over time, it burns into our sub-conscious and every whispered vow to ‘diet’ or ‘lose weight’ awakens the demon that shoves us towards another magically perfect day.

Such bullshit we shovel to our own selves!

I will simply recount some milestones of my life to demonstrate the debilitating cost of dodging the truth that now is the only moment you can count on. And that action, not intention will save the soul.

Be the judge.

1972. As a 14 year old, I confessed to my diary that my main problem of life was my weight.  1972? 41 years ago? And I haven’t waved the white flag of defeat yet?

1974. I qualify for the National Defence Academy and am promptly rejected – temporarily – for excess weight. I return home, give up all food save enough to preserve my mortality, jog many a kilometer in the sun and reach for the medical re-examination famished for the past day and a half. I am declared fit.

1983. My photos before and after marriage reveal a nouveau corpulence of dimensions that should have triggered warnings of imminent calamity. Others ascribed it to happiness thus placing a collective seal of approval on incipient obesity.

1987. During the annual medical examination, confronted by a particularly fastidious doctor who declared every intention of downgrading my medical category on account of obesity, I got to work. I designed a 1200-calorie diet that sucked the lard – and energy – out of me. I walked and walked, and when strength permitted I even jogged. I stayed completely away from oils and sugar. I dropped some 15 kilos, won the unbending medic’s grudging seal of approval and, without delay or fuss, moved back to imbibing fried stuffed parathas and the like.

1990. A mirror-image repeat of 1987. I stuck to the stringent regimen, making no exception to touch even a grain of sugar during celebrations for the birth of our younger son, Siddharth. I lost the 15 or so kilos I had assiduously accumulated. And after Mission Accomplished I reverted to Operation Undo Health with renewed resolve.

2000. I remained overweight through the decade, scaling higher numbers of varying impressiveness. But by 2000 I had completely outdone myself, resolutely staying above 100 kilos and often threatening to cross the 110 landmark. During a visit to Indian Space Research Organisation, on a special weighing scale I checked out how much I might weigh on different planets. I found that I was unfit and obese on all, barring for service on the moon.

2001. My father was operated upon after a cardiac attack. Pacing up and down in a corridor of the hospital I shook a fist at myself and vowed to wake up. After all, he had been in a far better shape than I was and was an inveterate teetotaler. If this did not change my orientation towards health, I asked, what would?

2003. Two more years passed while I waited for that perfect moment. Finally, fed up and cross with myself, I embraced the dangerous Dr Atkins’ Diet. I reinforced the caloric loss with a regular 5 km run, often plodding through the overnight snow. I lost 27 kilos in five months, prompting universal and inebriating adulation. Donning this newly emerged persona, I landed up in Hawaii on a 3-month Study Program. And promptly began to run the short route back to obesity.

2013. In the past decade, I have made many starts, only to flounder in days. A million Excel sheets have been drawn up, charts inserted, formulas set in place only to be deleted and banished even from the Recycle bin even before the downward worm had settled down.

13 August 2013. I am still over 100 kilos and still nursing the dream to scale down to 70!  And now I have begun again on a carefully crafted life-style that will ensure healthy eating, regular feed, controlled calories, dollops of exercise and adequate sleep. I am on my way, this time determinedly on a one-way ticket.

Follow my progress here. I will share menus, tips and numbers.

But, more crucially, if you too intend fighting the Battle of the Bulge, read the above story of my sporadic assaults carefully and know that Mr Bond was right – tomorrow never comes.

This is the weight of my argument.

This Morning

In the calm of early morning, along the path of my walk, is a hem of trees and undergrowth; solid green stillness lying in ambush. 

Not a leaf fluttered in defiance of this discipline, not a branch swayed inadvertently. 

The wind appeared to have been quarantined elsewhere, so the eye could absorb the offering un-distracted by movement. 

Or was I sleepwalking through a giant painting?

The Story Hereafter

I am 55.

This is quite a foundation, built of stones and bricks of a million sizes and every hue on display. It looks formidable but it isn't even of seamless texture, leave alone uniform strength. Indeed many parts of it are flawed and, while setting the next stone, I must ignore them for the sake of the longevity of the edifice that will follow.

Looked at individually, each stone is a fascination of indescribable wonder: look closely and you would spot many variations of the themes of success, failure, serendipity, grace, anxieties, fears, love, rage, drift, empathy, apathy, inebriation, solidity, flexibility, sobriety, affection, patriotism, cowardice, and you will have identified but a microcosm, a tiny bit visible easily to the naked eye.

No matter what the station of our lives, we still have an edifice to build. And as we engage in it, with or without the tools of mindfulness, we draw on what has gone before.

I have done my share of sleepwalking. I have perennially deluded myself that there is a perfect moment to begin living mindfully and that that moment arrives at a well-defined hour or date that has one distinguishing feature – it isn't now. I have ignored the passage of time and fuzzily pretended that it wasn't passing or could be bent at any moment and even recalled at will. I read the signposting that confirmed the directions I already knew and I often ignored the ones that warned me of errors, even grievous ones. In celebration of my ‘heroic youth’ I often wore lack of mindfulness as body armour, proofing myself against assault by reason and awareness. And I survived because grace cuts us huge slack.

Oh, don’t get me wrong; plenty of good too has been my tailwind. Like everyone else, I too have benefited from millions of brief shining moments that, stitched together, make me who I am. Yes, in balance I am in the black.

This blog is a very personal story of the structure that will rise; of that elusive mirage called future that, upon arrival after some trudge, always appears, like a passing ship, and as a place called now; of my life that will follow.

A life that must be crafted, brick by brick.

Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

I admire Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. I consider Purple Hibiscus a great book and Half of a Yellow Sun not too far behind. The Purple Hibiscus revealed what a great story teller she is - observant and empathetic with a felicity for lyrical prose. I took up Americanah with the eagerness of a child revisiting a favorite place and discarded my critical shield.

Do you already suspect what is coming next?

Disappointment might be too strong a word, but, to say the least, I was not bowled over. Americanah, a 480-page tome, is about 'race', particularly about its 'controversial' ism in America. It is more of an informal essay that relies on a flood of anecdotal props, stitched together to outline a story and thus couched as a work of fiction.

The story is largely seen through the eyes of a Nigerian woman - with a charming name Ifemelu - who travels from Nigeria to the US and, after a stay that ends in many loves, daily brushes with 'race', a blog and the acquisition of a Green Card, back to her native country. In the meanwhile, lest we not get the full picture, her first love Obinze also makes a sojourn to London before being deported for being an illegal immigrant.

The story line is thin and the entire purpose of the book is to squeeze every possible shade of racial differences as possible. The narrative does its best to paint a balanced picture - it is not merely a whites versus blacks story, but a sweeping account of the innate differences among people of different ethnic moorings. And it is built around the story of loss of love.

To be sure the book is an achievement in observation and retelling. It held my interest, if only because I felt that something more might be revealed. In the end though I found it mildly satisfying, it was a meal that held more promise than the cook could actually deliver.