I know why you did….

 I am currently on a weight-losing spree and this has reduced my diet a little. Given this background, I was having dinner yesterday and refused the 4th chhapati my wife was serving me. I had told her much

ahead that I would be having a light dinner but still her response was ‘I know you don’t love me. That is why you are not eating what I have made’.

 

I was glad she said that because more than anything else, it was a REVELATION. I have wondered why the personal part of people’s relationship is declining these days  The dinner incident answered this question – because others attribute reasons to your actions.

 

Throughout the many transactions, actions, talks during the day, I am surprised by the conviction with which people tell you why you did or are doing something.

 

Call someone (a friend or a cousin) after some duration’s gap and you may highly likely hear ‘Kya kaam hai’. When you have just called to talk to a dear one, it is perceived as a move with vested interests.

 

When you are late to an appointment for genuine reasons like someone unwell at home, people surprisingly think of all possible reasons other than the chance of your getting stuck somewhere.

 

There are times when your cell phone’s battery is down or there is a network problem or some such technical glitch or you may just be in a meeting where etiquette demands that your phone is on silent mode. When someone tries calling you without success, the conclusion drawn is ‘ hmmmm… he is not picking up my phone’.

 

The above phenomenon exists in the e-mail world as well. You may not be accessing the internet then. You may be in a meeting, facing a down link or for that matter got so many mails at one go that one or two miss your eye. The e-mail writer, though undergoing similar situations, may conclude that you don’t care. A generic statement may be issued stating you never reply to e-mails.

 

Until yesterday night, I was agitated about people telling me why I did what I did when the reasons were totally different and sincere. Thanks to my wife, I am calmer now. People will not stop attributing reasons for what you do and there is no point in justifying. If my wife can misunderstand me, I should be very naïve to expect others to see and accept my reasons for my actions.

    

Join A High Society Gym – Gain Weight And Be Happy

Join a high society gym in your neighborhood. Ensure that it is not more than 2 kms away from the your residence. This may sound difficult but with HNIs all around ensuring a good market, old bodybuilders with their software engineer children in the US have opened nice gyms in every area. 

The benefits of high society gyms are so many that I can articulate only few.

1. You get a personalized trainer whose job profile is to ensure that you are happy in the gym. The trainer is not there to force you on that treadmill or that stepper against your wish. He/She is there to address you respectfully, help you stretch a little and smile at you always.
2. It is close to your house. Driving to the gym won’t be stressful. You can drive 2 kms and then walk on the treadmill.
3. You can carry your cell phone inside and talk to your love or to your business associate and thus spend quality time.
4. It gives a great boost to your confidence by just mentioning to someone that you are in the gym or you are going to the gym and sentences like that.
5. You are surrounded by so many 250 pounds giants that your 200 looks just perfect.
6. While coming out, you can just remove your hand towel, shoes and wallet and check your weight. You will be half a pound lighter. Euphoric about this, you can now go home and have a hearty meal. Next day, wear a pair of shorts instead of the track pants to see further reduction!!

The above benefits and the many more I have not mentioned, will ensure that you at least don’t lose your existing weight. If you can maintain this discipline for a longer time, gaining from here on will be just an exponential function of time.

Who says you need to lose weight to be healthier? What is important is that you feel you are losing weight when in fact you are gaining. You are now happier, you don’t have to waste money on buying new clothes of smaller size, the immigration officer won’t ask you additional questions by constantly looking at your photo and your face and you completely avoid the risk of extra marital affairs.

It is just a matter of discipline and you will see excellent results in the first month itself.

Life Is Choice Making

Philosophers and thinkers have equated life with drama, stage, race and what not. I say – Life is just choice making!

The first serious thing that one does in the infancy of life is to answer the question “You love mummy more or papa?”. And here begins the whole process to never leave you throughout your life – small or long.

Making choices like sleeping on time to get that chocolate, one reaches school only to apply the newly acquired writing skills to essays like ‘My Best Friend’ and ‘My Favourite Teacher’. These may be difficuly choices to make for a young mind but life does not care – if you are alive, keep choosing.

Skipping a few stages to keep this short, let us now look at that secondary school dilemma. Even if you are good at all the subjects and really want to study them all, you need to choose – Science or Commerce or Arts. Mind you this is the choice that you make at that confused mid teen to decide in a big way your ensuing so many years – I mean if you don’t take in 100k calories a day and end your miseries!

Then starts the whole process to prove to the world the purity of your genes, the power of your intellect and  the worth of your hard work by darkening one out of 4 circles as many times as the number of questions they have chosen. So the better you choose, the better you are in the above parameters.

You now get a job ( remember that you have chosen to work here ), you choose everyday whether to arrive late or in time, to complete the work or leave it for tomorrow, to eat in the canteen or the nearby deli and so on and so forth.

You choose to fall to peer or family pressures to choose a life partner. You then choose to marry. Then you choose whether to have protected consummation of the same or not. If it is protected, you choose if it is through pills or rubber. If it is rubber, it is dotted or plain. In any case, you choose if it is scented or not. You see you are now close to completing half of your life as per the life expectancy in India and the grip of ‘Choice Making’ is becoming stronger by each passing day.

This can keep going on. Just think for a moment and you will realize  that choosing is what you do every second in your life. I chose to write this and you chose to read it. In some case, you may argue that you you take things as they come by without actually choosing something. Behold. This is also a choice between choosing and not choosing.

Entrepreneurship

 

These days, whenever I talk to someone, after the initial ice breaking and the ensuing talks on work, society, politics and what not, it finally comes to rhetoric on this difficult life that we lead these days. Almost everyone is unhappy with his/her job, wishes he/she could do something else and in most cases, open his/her own company and become an entrepreneur. If this becomes a faith worth following (chasing your own company and not God), Islam and Christianity will be dwarfed. If unhappy with your job and thus life as a whole, is becoming and entrepreneur really going to help you?

 

What makes us unhappy primarily is that we give control of our lives to others. The boss does not understand me, the management is taking all the wrong decisions, that client is too painful, I did’nt get that raise I deserved and many such things are what trouble us everyday at work. We  believe others are responsible for our miseries and we are helpless. And what is the solution – I will become my own boss, I will take the decisions I want, I will fire the client I don’t like and earn my money. Dearest, is this the right deduction?

 

Entrepreneurship, as I see, is not about starting your own company. It is an attitude. Let us understand it better by asking a few questions.

Do you really do what you want to do?

 

1. Most of us want that well deserved long weekend with family. How many of us take it?

    We don’t, fearing something that will never happen.

 

2. We want to go back home having finished our work at 6:00 PM. How many of us do it?

    We hang on till late fearing what others might think.

 

3. We see the Sensex seducing us every now and then. How many of us really invest?

    We keep discussing Indian economy, China, India’s great infrastructure boom et al.

    Ask anyone today about his/her willingness to invest in  stocks and you will hear a big yes.

    Ask the same person a year down the line and there won’t even be a DP account.

 

4. We know we need to start exercising, do more physical activity, go for a morning walk. 

    How many of us really do even one of these? We keep postponing this and then land up

    advancing our old age sicknesses.

 

This list can keep growing and I really don’t need to go further. Just think yourself and you would come across so many things that you wanted to do but never did. Do you know why? It is not that someone else is responsible. YOU are – you don’t have the ‘Entrepreneurship’ attitude!

 

Let us now see how a person with the entrepreneurship attitude would have handled the above situations. He/She would plan that holiday in advance, inform the boss, keep no pending tasks and then take that off. He/She would fix office timings and set the right expectations. Instead of wasting time near the coffee vending machine, he/she would complete the day’s work in time and achieve a good work-life balance. He/She would first get that DP account and start learning the stock market and eventually invest for good long-term returns. He/She would fix sleeping and rising time by switching off that TV, unnecessarily prolonged parties, useless late night calls and no result fetching e-mail replies in the night. He/She would sleep well; get up on time and go to the gym or for a walk.

 

Others are neither responsible for nor are they capable of spoiling your happiness. Embrace the entrepreneurship attitude and take control of your life.

 

** Compnies are not started because one is unhappy with one’s job. I don’t say don’t dream about starting your company. That too is possible only if you have the ‘Entrepreneurship’ attitude.

 

So Much For What?

The snail’s pace of Bangalore’s traffic has made my visual and audio sensors very efficient. What else is there to do than looking around and listening to FM channels while waiting for that light to turn green?
My efficient but selective sensors have been lately feeding me with sights of ‘Visitors’ parking not allowed’ signs and the sales pitch ‘Don’t let your neighbors spoil your special moments’. These two have impacted me so much that I, an always reclining TV viewer and an overweight dude of the beer gulping genre has picked up the pen – or should I say the keyboard!

In an apartment complex of more than 100 flats, is it impossible for one to receive that dear friend or that close relative? And all this because that planner just ignored parking place for 10 or so additional cars (assuming that at the most 10% people will have visitors at any time). When you can make that swimming pool in which I don’t even get in in my undies while 99 other families may be watching me, why not a place to park just 10 additional cars?
Lately, I had the fortune of watching a fantastic ad for Green Ply laminates or some such thing where the family brings home a close friend at knife point to just show him their flat’s interiors. I don’t know if I too will have to resort to such measures for that few hours where I will share with those elusive dear ones.

But things are just not stopping here. Now there is a conspiracy to make even your neighbors elusive. What is this – don’t let your neighbors spoil your special moments? Do neighbors really do that? Even with 4 other flats on the same floor, I have my privacy for those special coochy-coo moments. But I do need my neighbors to whom I can say ‘good morning’, whose children are pally with mine, who bring me that delicious daal maakhni, dhokla, cake whenever it is cooked in their houses, believing in who I am able to go on official tours leaving my family back.

Did I spend my whole life’s savings for that down payment and took a liability for 20 years that takes the most of my earnings every month to have no visitors and neighbors? Sunita Williams – you at least got the accolades, money and made history staying alone in space for all those months. But will I get something? So much for what – to be a spatial creature who will never get to see friends, cousins and even neighbors?