Deciding to do what you love doing is a no-brainer, actually!

You live only once – so go do whatever that makes you come alive.

A friend called to say that he was confused. He had secured admission to a Master’s Program at a premium University in the US. He is in his mid-30s. He has not got a scholarship to fund his Program. But his family and friends have agreed to support his two-year USD 100k+ fee requirement. His question: Should he, at his age, ‘educate’ himself at such a huge cost?

This confusion arises in most of us. We tend to perceive a strong sense of guilt in us, which we often blow out of proportion, in all matters that concern what we love to do. Simply, deciding to do what we love doing, we imagine, is tough. I really don’t think so.

Here’s a framework of questions that’s easy to employ in situations when you are confused or are feeling a pang of guilt or both! Evaluate what you love doing in Life – primarily on matters relating to career, higher education, a passion, your bliss – basis this framework:

1. Do you really want to do this – as in, is your heart in it? Will you enjoy doing this?
2. Will it be useful to you and make your Life meaningful if you choose to do this?
3. Can you afford this?

If you can answer yes to all three questions, just go do whatever you love doing.

The third question is significant and comes in handy to evaluate your Life choice based on economic parameters – if it is higher education, for instance, will you be able to afford the loan and repay it over time, if you are bringing the funds from outside? If you can reasonably convince yourself that you are financially preparing this investment after careful thought, you must just go ahead.

Somehow, we are never quite confused when acquiring material assets – stuff that makes us feel financially secure. If you are buying a house for USD 100k+/Rs.75 Lakh, you may not seriously think so much about it. Because socially, culturally, we are wired to consider purchase of property (or gold) as an investment. But education is seen as an expense. An experience that makes you come alive is seen as an expense. A career in creativity is seen as an expense. I don’t understand why we value our (financial) wealth more than our bliss?

As I see it, a degree from a US school is just a worthless piece of paper. Like a degree from anywhere else in the world. But pursuing a degree in an international school, in a multi-cultural environment, is an experience. And you are paying actually for the experience, for the knowledge you will gain beyond the curriculum and the class room, for the relationships and the resilience you will develop going through the academic tenure of any Program. Now, I will give the same advice to someone coming in from, let us say, the US and wanting to study in India – please do. Again not for the paper degree, but for getting schooled in India’s myriad cultures and work ethic. So, my vote is for any experience that can enrich you, no matter who you are, than just make you rich.

For making your Life meaningful, you must think beyond economic parameters and constraints. The focus should always be on how can I make my Life count and be useful? And not on the fact that it costs so much money to make it count. If you can answer what makes you come alive, if you have an opportunity that will help you live every moment of your Life fully, in bliss, and if you have found the means to sustain yourself without upsetting your immediate circle of influence, primarily your family’s economic ecosystem, you must go do it. Don’t think too much. I will leave you with what I remember reading somewhere – the opportunity of this lifetime must be utilized before this lifetime expires – during in the lifetime of the opportunity!   

How can you hold anyone responsible for what is happening to them?

To be able to separate the doer from the deed is a very mature, evolved, human quality.

Yesterday, we watched a much celebrated Kannada film Thithi (2015, Raam Reddy). Apart from being feted globally by audiences and film-makers alike, it has won a National Award in India, the Golden Leopard at the Locarno Film Festival and was judged the Best Film in Shanghai last month. The story is of four men, spanning four generations, from one family from a village in Karnataka’s Mandya district – all characters in the film are played by non-professional actors. It’s an unpretentious story, told with honesty, with real people.

Thithi left me with a deep, spiritual message. In the film, a central character, Gadappa, an old man, narrates his story to some shepherds. He tells them how his father ended up having an affair with his (Gadappa’s) wife. When Gadappa discovers her secret, catching her virtually red-handed, he doesn’t utter a word. He simply takes her home. The woman, consumed by shame and guilt, ends her Life. Gadappa tells this story in a non-plussed manner, with a straight face, even as an accepting, benign smile tries to peep out of his thick beard. And then, in a totally detached manner, he declares: “I don’t even know if all this was just a dream…I don’t care…at the end of the day, we must all be happy. That’s it!”

Gadappa’s attitude reminded me of a friend of mine who has loaned me money. He gave away a portion of the funds that he had saved for his entrepreneurial journey. He had started a venture and half-way through investing in it, he decided to wind it up and return to seek employment. When I approached him for a loan, he immediately parted with the balance of what was left in his entrepreneur fund. As it has turned out, I have still been unable to repay him and several others that I have borrowed money from (my Book Fall Like A Rose Petal – Westland Books – tells you why). Every time I write to him or speak to him, seeking his forgiveness and understanding for this endless delay in being able to repay him, my friend has always replied: “It’s not as if I don’t need that money back AVIS. I do. But how can I ever hold it against you for what you are going through? It is only because of what you are going through that you are unable to pay me back – I know and understand that. But how can I hold you responsible?”

It is indeed a great human quality to not hold anyone responsible for what’s happening to and with them. It embodies trust, compassion and forgiveness. People’s actions may hurt you – take Gadappa’s story or my friend’s. But you must forgive. You must learn to replace anger and bitterness with trust and compassion. And you just move on. I am not sure this will work for everyone or will work in all contexts. But I have found that wherever people have not succumbed to the temptation to grow hatred and anger, better understanding and bonding has prevailed. This is possible, I have noticed, when you separate the doer from the deed. You may always condemn the deed, but you can also forgive the doer and embrace the doer with love and compassion.

Inspired by my friend’s approach towards me, I have tried practicing this principle myself. And whenever I have done this, I have always felt that I am at peace – with myself, my circumstances and with my world.

Don’t squander your energy – and time – trying to change people who don’t want to change

In a relationship conflict, consider preserving your inner peace first. That’s what matters most.

A young lady we met recently talked about her failed marriage. She said when she saw the relationship withering away, she took time off to think things through. And then she came back into the relationship to give it one more chance. But when her spouse refused to see value or reason in her efforts, she said, she just decided to move on. “I didn’t see the point anymore. I knew I had to go on to live the Life that was waiting for me,” she explained.

Break-ups are never easy. Surely not when you have made every effort to make things better. But prudence lies in thinking the way the young lady reasoned with her situation. You can try to wake up someone who is asleep. But you can never quite wake up someone who is pretending to be asleep. So, if a relationship must work – any relationship – both parties must be ready and willing to change. This is not about being willing to adjust or accommodate alone; it is about being to relate to each other’s points of view. I don’t think there’s anyone who will be unreasonable or unwilling to change themselves if they see, agree and relate to the other person’s point of view. The tragedy is that most of the time they don’t relate to what you are saying. And so they refuse to change. Therefore, in such cases, it is just best you move on instead of hoping, pining and waiting for the other person to change, losing precious time in Life doing this, and often suffering through the process.

A fundamental understanding we all need to cultivate is that nobody is good or bad; no one is right or wrong. It is just that each of us is a product of the time – in Life – that we are going through. So, in some phases in Life, people refuse to see what’s evident, what’s simple and what’s best for all parties concerned. They just think that what they are thinking is right, they believe in what they are doing and they understand that their way, their reasoning, is the only way. So, when dealing with such a situation, when the parties involved in a relationship conflict are refusing to see each other’s point of view, it is best to not press on. This is not giving up, this is not being selfish either. This is being practical, logical and sensible. This is about wanting to preserve your inner peace and choosing to be happy.

When you don’t know what to do, simply play along with Life!

You don’t have to know everything or have all the answers. It is fine to be clueless. In fact, it is great to just be.

I am in a familiar zone this morning. I have no idea of what’s going to happen. (Now, I know, the truth is none of us can ever know what’s going to happen!) But I am referring to all our efforts at putting our business back on track, the way we want it to be, that have come unstuck. Yet again. It surely is unsettling at a practical, material, everyday level. But this is not something that we don’t have experience dealing with. Vaani and I have seen this time and again, that whenever we don’t seem to know what is happening or why it is happening and what we must do, Life has always shown us the way. That way may not be something we would have known of or liked to take, but we implicitly trust Life and allow ourselves to be led by it. This is perhaps why we don’t suffer despite our often excruciating circumstances.

The human desire to know why something is happening to you is what causes your suffering. The simplest way to avoid suffering is to stop asking why or why me. Stop wanting to know all the answers to questions that fox you. Stop wanting to solve all your problems at the same time. In fact, there will be times in your Life, when you can’t solve even one of your problems – let alone all. You will just be pushed to a corner by Life, button-holed and made irrelevant. Of course, you will be irritated, you will feel helpless and totally, completely, lost. This is when suffering will arrive in your Life. But it will lay siege only if you want answers, only when you seek solutions, only if you ask why. Instead if you just accept that being clueless, being helpless, being solution-less is fine, you will not suffer, despite the pain.

So, when I am in that zone, where I am this morning, I don’t ask why. I simply surrender to Life and say, be my light, show me the way and give me the strength, the stamina, to further endure the journey. I have learnt, that it is best, when you don’t know what to do, to simply play along with Life – as in this immortal song from Dev Anand’s Hum Dono (1961, Amarjeet/Vijay Anand, Mohd. Rafi, Jaidev, Sahir Ludhianvi)! 

Your story is your Life path. Let the path unfold, you just go wherever it takes you.

Live your story. Live a Life that matters.

Over the weekend, I was invited to share a transformational moment of my Life at a story-telling session. Now, I am often invited to speak at forums and events. And I almost always share my story. Even through the workshops that Vaani and I lead and anchor, we share stories – both from our own personal experiences and of what we see and learn from Life around us. We also encourage participants at our workshops to share their personal journeys so that they can bond and function better as teams. But this story-telling session that we attended on Sunday was different. It was structured, time-bound story-telling. It was a beautiful experience, hearing so many, intensely personal, stories from rank strangers.

So, there was the retired principal of a corporation school – he talked of how he learnt to live intelligently and serve selflessly from his own students, most of them coming from broken homes; they came only for the lure of the noon-meals the school offered, as it was the only meal the children got daily! There was a man who shared his story of remorse and guilt – over shamelessly demanding a dowry from his millionaire father-in-law, turning an alcoholic thereafter – and how he found love and meaning in his Life, thanks to his wife forgiving him and showing him so much compassion and understanding. Then there was this young, TamBram lady who rebelled against the institution of marriage and who was given an apartment to live separately by her conservative father – she talked of the various people she ended up living with in her apartment and what she learnt from each of them.

This experience only corroborated what I have always believed in: understanding personal stories matters a lot in relationships. I read somewhere, long, long ago, that behind every beating heart is a personal story. And, I have learnt from Life that, if you understand that story, relating to – or choosing not to relate to – the other person in a relationship becomes that much simpler.

Most relationships, across all contexts and not necessarily limited to a romantic liaison between two people, become messy because, after the initial phase of getting to know a person, there is no effort by either party to understand the other. Knowing their stories helps. Our part-time helper at home, for instance, came late to work today. Now, it is normal for us to imagine that she, like most other housemaids like her, is playing silly and truant. But when Vaani paused to hear her story, it turns out that she’s being repeatedly physically abused by her drunkard husband. I am not saying that we can solve someone’s problems by knowing their story. But knowing someone’s story surely helps us deal with them with empathy and compassion. We may or may not choose to engage with a person after hearing their story. And that’s fine. But at least we can avoid imagining and perceiving the person to be something that he or she is not.

For a person who shares a story, the experience of sharing is a therapeutic one. I can vouch for this. Over the last few years, Vaani and I have healed greatly through being open and sharing our story – through my Book, my Talks, events that we curate and through this Blog that I write daily. So contrary to popular perception that sharing our stories makes us vulnerable, I would say, sharing our stories helps us experience the warmth, compassion, love and kindness that makes up the Universe!

But, most important, your story shapes you – it refines you, makes you stronger and helps you evolve. It leads you to live a Life that matters. But for that to happen, you must embrace the experiences that come your way, without resisting them, and be prepared to go through your own adventure. So, when your story unfolds, when you path begins to appear, just offer yourself to be led by Life. You can be sure that, over time, you will arrive where you must – and where you belong!

‘Kun Faayakun’ – a prescription for a happy, happy week ahead!

It is what it is. You just be available to, present in and accepting of what is. And you will be at peace and happy!

Yesterday, while watching Rockstar (2011, Imtiaz Ali, Irshad Kamil, A.R.Rahman, Javed Ali, Mohit Chauhan, Nizami Brothers) on TV, my daughter, listening to A.R.Rahman’s soul-stirring number Kun Faayakun, asked me what the song’s opening words meant. I have often wanted to know what they meant too. So, I looked up Google. And this was the most beautiful answer I got.

Kun Faayakun comes from the Arabic words “Kun (كن)” which means “to be” or “to exist” and “Faayakun (فيكون)” which  means “It is”. So its literal meaning is “Be, and, It is”. Kun Faayakun actually is a Quranic verse referred to five times in the Quran. It is referred to symbolize God’s creative power. This term is about God’s will and absolute control over every creation. In Surah Baqrah (2:117) this phrase appears as: “The Originator of the heavens and the earth, when He decrees a matter, He only says to it: “Be!” and “It is.””

While that may be the definitive, scriptural meaning, I feel closer to understanding the meaning of Kun Faayakun, at a spiritual level, as this: Whatever it is, is; so just be and let whatever is, just be. It is what it is.

So, when there is pain, let the pain simply be. Don’t resist it. When there is grief, let the grief just be, don’t ask for it to not be there. When there is joy, experience the joy. Just be in what is, with what is. All your suffering comes from resisting any current reality in your Life. When you don’t wish the presence of anything that is, you suffer. So, Kun Faayakun, to me, celebrates the spirit of acceptance, by just being with what is.

And my favorite line from Irshad Kamil’s lyrics in the song is this one: “…araj tujhe kar de mujhe mujhse hi riha…” which means “…my plea to Thee is to free me of myself…” If you truly have understood the impermanence of Life, if you have understood its transient nature, you will feel closest to creation and learn to be detached from your worldliness. Your worldliness comes from all that you are attached to – your name, your gender, your age, qualifications, assets, wealth, relationships, opinions, memories, experiences, reputation…and anything that you have acquired here on this journey through this planet, in this lifetime. And it is only because of your being attached to your worldly acquisitions that you suffer. Drop your attachments and your suffering will end. Instantaneously.

This is how I have learnt to live. I am in great pain because of my circumstances. But I don’t suffer anymore. And I have learnt to be non-suffering only by just being and letting everything just be – as it is. ‘Kun Faayakun’ to me, therefore, is not only a great A.R.Rahman song, it is not just a Quranic verse, it is the spirit of my very being. And it is beautiful! It is, if you like, a prescription, for happiness too!

 

Make some time daily to make memories

There’s opportunity every day to do something meaningful or experience something beautiful – if you really want to.

Most newspapers this morning are commemorating 25 years of liberalization and reforms in India – of the unusual partnership, between then Prime Minister Narasimha Rao and Finance Minister Dr.Manmohan Singh, that changed India forever. Seeing all the coverage about this epochal Budget speech of July 24^th, 1991, I asked myself, what was I doing 25 years ago, around the same time?

A flood of memories came rushing back.

I remember, Vaani and I had just moved to Trivandrum on July 10^th, 1991. I was working with India Today then. Since my senior colleague Ramesh Menon was transferred to New Delhi, I was asked by my boss, the venerable Prabhu Chawla, if I would like to shift to Kerala as the state correspondent for the magazine. I grabbed the opportunity. We moved into the same apartment that Ramesh had lived in. He and his wife Geeta had left behind some cane chairs that would be the only furniture in our home for many, many, months. This was our first home – for Vaani and me. We had been living with my parents until then – a decision that I quickly realized I should have never taken – for almost 18 months after our wedding in February 1989. So, to be on our own was a big high.

It was a beautiful time, very intimate, very romantic. We were 24 and 25 – Vaani and I. I barely made Rs.4,500/- a month as salary. We had no refrigerator or mixer or grinder. Vaani often made a simple, but delicious meal of kappa and puzhukku-ari kanji, with green chillies to go with it, for dinner. We slept on the ground as we did not have a bed or a cot. We spent memorable weekends doing up our home with artefacts that I would pick up from my travels around Kerala. Each month, we saved up a wee bit to buy appliances or furniture or linen for our home.

Our son Aashirwad was only a year old. When he was just six months old, we had tonsured his head so that his hair would grow richer. So, one Sunday, I decided to take Aash for a haircut – his first – on my Bajaj Cub scooter. I can recall that day so vividly. Aash was so excited. And so was I. It was a big feeling to be a parent, to be living in an independent apartment, to be raising a family with Vaani.

Soon after, for the next 15-odd years, I immersed myself in building my career, and later our business. My memories of the time I spent at home during this frenzied phase are not as vivid as I would like them to be. It wasn’t until our bankruptcy struck, and Life forcibly slowed me down, that I realized how much I had missed in the years that I had been toiling away – mindlessly, possibly avariciously. While I do remember random work-related, mostly stressful, events, I don’t have too many home or family memories from everyday moments to lean back on. That’s how I learnt this lesson, the hard way, that pretty soon, you will arrive at a point in Life when all you will have are memories. And so, it makes great sense to create beautiful ones even as you live, often barely getting past, each day.

This means, on a daily basis, no matter what the stress, no matter how packed your day looks, no matter what the situations or contexts you are placed in are, create one beautiful moment or participate in the one that is available to you. For instance, always kiss someone dear goodbye. Or pause to see a sunrise or sunset. Or feel the rain as it comes down instead of rushing away indoors. Or look someone – a random stranger – in the eye to thank them for their kindness. Or just make it a point to have 5 minutes with your family, without looking at your smartphone, daily.

Treat this time that you will dedicate daily to create memories as your true ‘Selfie’ time. That is, time for yourself! Time, that you will upload to your memory, to draw upon, when you have nothing but lots of time on your hands but no one to spend it with!! I didn’t do this for a significant part of my Life. Thankfully, I no longer regret it – because I have evolved to understand that regretting is a complete waste of time. I say it here now, just so that, in case you are living your Life the way I used to, you can awaken and go make some time to make memories.