In his book Karma, Acharya Prashant answers various questions posed to him by his diverse audience over decades. Offering an enriching kaleidoscopic perspective to readers, this books traverses alleys through interactions based around human conditions, confusions and questions related to one’s identity, one’s actions, and how to take the right actions. Read this excerpt from the book on when to think and when to act. It answers a question asked to Acharya Prashant: ‘I do not express my thoughts because I am socially restrained. I am afraid of being judged. Can I free myself only by deeds?’
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Karma || Acharya Prashant
There is no more a final arbiter than action, deeds, life. What else is life but a continuous flow of actions? One finally has to give oneself the liberty to do it. Talking as a precursor to doing is all right, acceptable, but talking as a substitute to doing is evil.
If you want to use talking or thinking or discussing as a preparatory method before leaping into action, it is okay. Sometimes, the beginner needs that. Sometimes, everybody needs to think a little before taking a leap. Other times, one needs to talk to herself, sometimes to others. All that is understandable. But if one becomes a professional thinker specializing in nothing but thought and deliberation, and therefore vacillation and inaction, then it is merely self-deception. Also, I must warn you against the temptation to be fully sure at the level of thought. No absolute clarity is possible at the level of thought. Thought can bring you a certain level of clarity. It would be a relative level.
So, if you insist that unless you are totally clear with your thoughts you will not move, then you have ensured that you are never really going to move; then you will always have a reason to think a little more because thought by its very design can never be fully certain. An iota of doubt will always be residually present, and you can very well exploit that last iota to keep stretching the thought.
This is where faith is important. Faith is needed, so that you can act without being fully certain. At the level of thought, thought is still raising its habitual objections, but you say to thought, ‘You might not be clear. I am clear.’
Have you ever found thought coming to a final conclusion? That which appears like concluded tonight reopens for discussion tomorrow morning because a final conclusion would mean the death of thought. So, why would mind ever lend itself to conclusion? Thought would always leave a little scope for doubt to remain. And then, based on that doubt, that uncertainty, more thinking can be justified.
So, think if you must, but never expect thought to come to a solution. Thought is useful, but in matters of living, loving, and Truth, the utility of thought is limited. Do not try to overexploit thought. You will end up being exploited.
If you are saying that social restrictions, etc., are preventing you from enacting what you know, then you will have to weigh the security that you get from social conformity against the suffering that you get from this willing avoidance of your destiny.
What is bigger, your demand for security or your love for Truth?
This answer will determine your life.
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To know in depth about Karma, what it means and how it functions, the ways of choosing the right action and the results that come from those actions, read Acharya Prashant’s Karma.
Simi is a marketeer for a furniture company.
Ranvir is an analyst at a finance start-up.
At BizWorks, a swanky co-working space, their paths aren’t meant to cross. But as circumstances bring them together, again and again, they find it harder to deny the spark between them.
Scroll down for an excerpt from this story of a sweet and delicious romance set in a co-working space in Bangalore.
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Champak, made his grand entry— the strap of his satchel bag taut across his chest, his round glasses slipping off his nose, his sharp, hawk eyes darting around to take in everything.
Champak, the all-knowing, overachieving, obsequious, boss’s chamcha, was taken aback by the sight of Simi at work.
‘You’re here already!’ he exclaimed. He made a dash to claim the seat opposite Simi, to her inward groan.
‘Why do you have to sit here?’ Simi frowned. ‘There are so many other seats.’
Strictly at Work || Sudha Nair
‘It’s motivating if we can see each other.’ His fake smile grated on her nerves. ‘Healthy competition, you know. . . ’
In their old office, Champak had sat a few cubicles away from Simi, but even then, he had constantly kept an eye on her and anyone who came into her cubicle. He knew everything—how late she came in, how long she took for lunch, how early she left.
He bragged about his skills, always trying to ingratiate himself with the boss and bag the best campaigns. Now, he was right in her face. There was practically no escape! Deepa waltzed in right after him. ‘Hey!’ Deepa twirled around and took in the new place, looking just as much in awe of it as Simi had been.
‘This is wonderful!’ ‘You’re late,’ Champak exclaimed. ‘You?’ She groaned. ‘Couldn’t you find another place to sit?’
If Simi called Champak a prick, Deepa called him a flirt. Deepa was the designer on the team, and Champak was always at her desk with some changes or the other. ‘What better place to see you all the time.’ He grinned at Deepa.
He thought he was flirting with her, but on the contrary, he was irritating the heck out of her. Deepa rolled her eyes.
‘More like see and hear us all the time,’ she muttered under her breath. He was such a pest! ‘Now we can’t even talk in peace,’ Deepa whispered to Simi. Deepa was right. But that didn’t stop their whispered raptures about their window seats and proximity to the break room and restrooms. ‘Girls, does either of you have a red gel pen?’ Champak asked, setting up his laptop, a notebook beside it, and three coloured markers neatly arranged on the side. Ugh! He was so irritating!
The git! Both of them ignored him and got to work. Simi continued to work on her presentation slides, thanking her stars for the charger or she wouldn’t have been able to do anything until now. At 10 a.m., they all got up and headed to one of the small conference rooms for the meeting. She gave her presentation on the new social media campaign for the Pumpkin chair. Champak interrupted her on almost every slide with questions and suggestions for improvement.
‘I think green will look better for that message,’ or ‘A stronger punchline would make a better impact!’
She tried to keep her cool and not get pulled into the black hole of his questions. Every time Champak opened his mouth, she felt a tightness in her belly, as if he was going to expose a mistake that she’d inadvertently made and make her look like a fool in front of everyone. Sometimes their boss, Nandan, picked up on Champak’s suggestions, but today, it looked like even he wasn’t in the mood for interruptions. ‘Let her complete her presentation, Champak!’
Nandan said finally. That made Champak shut up through the rest of the slides.
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Sudha Nair won the Amazon KDP Pen to Publish 2017 contest for her debut novel, The Wedding Tamasha—a tale about love, family, values, and traditions.
Vir Sanghvi’s has been an interesting life – one that took him to Oxford, movie and political journalism, television and magazines – and he depicts it with the silky polish his readers expect of him. In A Rude Life, he turns his dispassionate observer’s gaze on himself, and in taut prose tells us about all that he’s experienced, and nothing more for he’s still a private man.
He unhurriedly recounts memories from his childhood and college years, moving on to give us an understanding of how he wrote his biggest stories, while giving us an insider’s view into the politics, glamour and journalism of that time
Here’s a glimpse into his book.
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A Rude Life || Vir Sanghvi
As Advani had predicted, the BJP did well but not as well as Janata. It got 85 seats while Janata got 143. (The Congress got 197, far more than any other party but around a hundred seats short of a majority.)
The BJP said it would support Janata but even together, the two parties did not have a majority. They needed another fifty seats and they got them when the Left parties agreed to support them from outside.
This three-cornered alliance was full of contradictions. The 1977–79 Janata government had fallen, at least partly, because Janata members objected to the Jan Sangh’s communal roots. The BJP was even more of a Hindu party now than the Jan Sangh had been in 1977. Would this not be a problem? And what about the Left? Was it comfortable being part of a three-cornered arrangement with the BJP?
The only person for whom the alliance made sense was L.K. Advani. He would be remembered, he believed, as the man who had taken the BJP from a mere two seats in parliament to being the kingmaker at the next election.
There was yet another complication. Janata was not the old Janata Party any longer. It was now the Janata Dal, composed of some of the old Janata veterans but supplemented by a new party of Congress defectors led by V.P. Singh and Arun Nehru. The two sides did not get along. Chandra Shekhar, from the old Janata, for instance, had total contempt for V.P. Singh whom he viewed as a characterless opportunist.
How was this all going to work?
I was deeply skeptical about the prospects of any arrangement lasting. Till that point, India had mostly been run by governments with majorities in the Lok Sabha. Mrs Gandhi had briefly lost her majority after the Congress split in 1969 but even though she knew that she could count on the communists to back her, she had called a mid-term election (where she won a majority) as soon as she could.
Our sole experience with coalitions was the disastrous 1977 to 1979 period when politicians frittered away the goodwill that had got them elected and forced the electorate to recall Indira Gandhi, her transgressions during the Emergency forgiven.
I did not believe that this government would last even for a year. Apart from the contradictions between the BJP and the Left, there were too many differences within the Janata Dal itself.
I went to meet Chandra Shekhar at his ‘ashram’ (a large estate; ‘ashram’ sounded nicer than ‘pleasure palace’) in Bhondsi on the outskirts of Delhi. I had known Chandra Shekhar during my Imprint days because a friend of mine, Kamal Morarka, was a dedicated Chandra Shekhar supporter who boosted his prospects even when the Rajiv wave was at its height.
Chandra Shekhar believed he should be prime minister. He had opposed the Emergency and later had been the centre of all opposition to Indira Gandhi. He believed that with the Congress out of power his time had finally come.
I told him I didn’t think he had the votes. Besides, V.P. Singh had led the campaign against Rajiv (Chandra Shekhar had refrained from personal attacks) so the media expected Singh to be the next prime minister. Chandra Shekhar did not agree with me but looked grim.
I have no idea what happened next but TV footage showed Chandra Shekar, Devi Lal (a Haryana leader) and others laughing delightedly before they went into the meeting of the Janata Dal parliamentary party. After the meeting was called to order, Chandra Shekhar was called on to speak. He said he proposed Devi Lal for prime minister.
Devi Lal was then asked to accept the nomination. He said that he was honoured to be nominated but felt that the position belonged to V.P. Singh.
V.P. Singh then got up. He did not nominate anyone else. He grabbed the job and ran with it.
Obviously some deal that excluded Chandra Shekhar had been struck. Devi Lal had agreed not only to accept V.P. Singh as prime minister, he had agreed to deceive Chandra Shekhar as well. They had made a fool of Chandra Shekhar in front of the parliamentary party and the TV cameras.
Afterwards, Chandra Shekhar told the press that he had been betrayed which may have been the understatement of the year. But even he did not realize how completely he had lost out. When the ministry was sworn in, Chandra Shekhar’s supporters were sidelined or kept out. Yashwant Sinha, who was told he was only a minister of state, walked out of the swearing in and drove straight to Bhondsi to confer with Chandra Shekhar.
I met Chandra Shekhar a few days later at his MP’s bungalow in Delhi. He was livid with V.P. Singh and with Arun Nehru who, he said, had plotted the deception. Oddly enough, he felt no rancour towards Devi Lal without whom none of this could have happened. The way Chandra Shekhar told it, V.P. Singh had publicly declared that he wanted no position. But his followers had made it clear that they would not accept Chandra Shekhar. So Devi Lal had been chosen as a compromise candidate.
Either, Arun Nehru took Devi Lal aside after the consensus was arranged and told him to give the job to V.P. Singh or the whole exercise was a con job from the very beginning, intended only to make a fool out of Chandra Shekhar. He preferred the first explanation. I thought the second was more likely.
The problem with V.P. Singh was that he was a little like Arvind Kejriwal is today. Financially upright, soft-spoken, competent and capable of evoking strong emotions among his supporters. But he was also a man without any core beliefs, without any long-term loyalty (except to one or two political friends) and without any transparency. Even Advani who was vilified by the secular media was a relatively straight person.
If he said he was going to do something, he usually did it. V.P. Singh, on the other hand, was capable of such duplicity that if you asked him what day of the week it was and he said Tuesday, the chances were that it was really Friday. But he was charming, intelligent and entirely plausible at first. I had admired him in my Imprint days and I could see why he was now such a hero to the media. But how long, I wondered, before the media discovered how hollow he was? How long before the early popularity faded?
When Taran N. Khan first arrived in Kabul in the spring of 2006-five years after the Taliban government was overthrown-she found a city both familiar and unknown. Shadow City is an account of Khan’s expeditions around the city of Kabul, a personal and meditative portrait of a city we know primarily in terms of conflict.
Here’s an excerpt from the book:
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In the bluster and immensity of war—the one that began in 2001 and the ones before it—it is easy to forget that Kabul existed 3000 years ago. Years after I arrived, I read a description of the city that seemed to ring true. ‘Like some people, certain cities suffer from amnesia,’ it said. ‘Not that they have no past. Rather, this past, no matter how glorious it may have been, will have left so few reminders, so few architectural vestiges, so few visible traces, that it remains something obscure, if not completely invisible.’ In this ‘amnesiac city’, I found that walking offered a way to exhume history—a kind of bipedal archaeology—as well as an excavation of the present…
Exploring Kabul, I found, required the same principles that help in the reading of mystical Persian poetry, in the relationship between the zahir, or the overt, and the batin, the hidden or implied. This works on the tacit understanding that what is being said is an allegory for what is meant or intended. To talk of the moon, for instance, is to talk of the beloved; to talk of clouds across the moon is to talk of the pain of separated lovers; to talk of walls is to speak of exile. Such wandering leads through circuitous routes to wide vistas of understanding. Like walking through a small gate into a large garden. It is also a useful reminder that in this city, what is seen is often simply one aspect of the truth. What lies behind—the shadow city—is where layers are revealed…
Kabul is an island, or so it appears to the outsider standing on one of its nondescript, potholed streets. It deceives you with its high walls streaked with brown mud, punctuated by steel-topped gates. It hides behind the fine mist of dust that hangs over its streets and homes, so that the city appears as though from the other side of a soft curtain. Like a mirage, a place that is both near and far away…
Shadow City || Taran N. khan
A walk through the history of Kabul would begin where the city itself began—a settlement by a river, at the heart of which is a citadel. Inside the walls of this Bala Hissar, or High Fortress, was a city in itself, with barracks, homes and bazaars. Over time Kabul expanded along the southern bank of the river that flows between the Koh-e-Sher Darwaza and the Koh-e-Asmai. The remains of Kabul’s thick wall radiate over the sprawl of the Sher Darwaza; they are said to date back as far as the fifth century…
Kabul was captured by the Tajik rebel leader Habibullah Kalakani, who was derisively called Bacha-e-Saqao (son of the water carrier) because of his humble roots.16 Kalakani’s reign lasted only nine months. By October 1929, Amanullah’s cousin Nadir Khan had managed to retake Kabul. He was declared king and attempted to introduce more measured reforms. But he also met a bloody end and was assassinated while attending the graduation ceremony of a high school in Kabul. His son Zahir Shah took the throne in 1933. He was to be the last king of Afghanistan, ruling for forty years.
Through these political changes, Kabul continued to spread further on the north bank of the river, with the suburb of Shahr-e- Nau laid out in the 1930s. Its orderly grids of houses, surrounded by gardens and high walls, contrasted with the congested lanes of the Shahr-e-Kohna. Embassies and foreign missions of the nations that were establishing relations with Afghanistan through the 1940s were set up here, beside the residences of Kabul’s upper and middle classes.
Through the 1960s and 1970s, the capital grew steadily, due in part to migration by rural families from the provinces. Walking through its streets, it would have been possible to see houses and shops expanding the city’s edges, spreading to both sides of the Kohe-Asmai, climbing over the slopes of its hills. By the early 1970s, Kabul was the mostly peaceful capital of a small country, home to around half a million people. And then everything changed.
Part reportage and part reflection, Shadow City is an elegiac prose map of Kabul’s hidden spaces-and the cities that we carry within us.
In this fascinating book, Hisila Yami traces her journey from being a young Nepali student of architecture in Delhi in the early eighties to becoming a Maoist revolutionary engaging in guerrilla warfare in Nepal. Yami was one of the two women leaders who were a part of the politburo of the Communist Party of Nepal (Maoist), which led the People’s War in the country that changed the course of its history forever.
Read on to take a glimpse into the remarkable life of a this incredible woman when she was just beginning to form her political opinions.
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Hisila||Hisila Yami
I was eighteen years old when my future husband, BRB, asked me this question: ‘What is your aim in life?’ I had just finished a game of tennis and was standing in front of the tennis court at New Delhi’s School of Planning and Architecture (SPA) hostel. BRB, then twenty-three, had come to SPA for a master’s degree in architecture. He had completed a BArch (bachelor of architecture) degree from Chandigarh. I was then a second-year student of BArch at SPA. Apart from studies, I was enjoying several other pursuits: I was learning classical music at Mandi House, the centre of art and culture in Delhi, and transcendental meditation in Defence Colony. I remember having replied spontaneously: ‘Why have an aim in life? Let life flow freely.’ This was the level of my apolitical thinking.
Being in the heart of Delhi during the Emergency (1975–77) imposed by Indira Gandhi, we hardly felt its pangs as our elite college kept its distance from politics. We used to entertain ourselves with dances and special dinners on weekends. I was blissfully unaware that, under the Maintenance of Internal Security Act (MISA), many political activists were being hunted down. I had vaguely heard about the forceful sterilizations ordered by Sanjay Gandhi during that period. My peers and I were concerned, but only to a certain degree, when there was a drive to evict squatter settlements in an attempt to beautify Delhi.
During that time, I recollect the launch of a new fizzy drink called Double Seven (77), meant to commemorate the end of the Emergency in 1977. It was an Indian soft drink launched by the Janata Party in place of Coca-Cola, which we missed a lot. The Janata Party had come to power after the Congress, under the leadership of Indira Gandhi, lost the election. I remember my friends making fun of Prime Minister Morarji Desai for drinking his own urine as a form of medical therapy. They used to call it ‘Morarji Cola!’
Although my parents, Dharma Ratna Yami and Heera Devi Yami, were politically active in Nepal, I had little knowledge of politics. Being the youngest of seven children, I had had a pampered upbringing. Even when I lost my mother at the age of ten, I was never made to feel her absence because my sisters and brother took good care of me. Amongst them, Timila Yami, my second-eldest sister, stood out as she was the one who got me admitted to Central School (Kendriya Vidyalaya) on the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT) campus in Kanpur, which is where she was studying electrical engineering. At that time, I was twelve years old and joined the seventh grade. The year was 1971. Since I was a minor, it was with great difficulty that she got permission to put me up in the IIT girls’ hostel. All the girls there treated me like their little sister, possessively telling me to eat this and not that. They taught me the art of simple living. Indeed, I saw established scientists and engineers clad in simple kurta-suruwal and slippers. This was in great contrast to what I had seen in Kathmandu, where most of the people were overdressed. Alongside studies, I participated in sports, cultural activities and debates in school. During those days, I was bubbling with energy—a jack of all trades and a master of none.
I remember stumbling upon a magazine called Manushi while pursuing BArch in Delhi around 1979. It was an English feminist magazine edited by Madhu Kishwar and Ruth Vanita. Soon, I started attending their meetings. I think gender awareness seeped into my being at the IIT Kanpur girls’ hostel, where I saw many strong, intelligent women compete with men. Girls were allowed to visit the boys’ hostel and vice versa. The atmosphere on the campus was quite egalitarian. This was in contrast to the rest of Uttar Pradesh, which had a predominantly patriarchal setting. Maybe this was why I was drawn to Manushi. I wrote my first feminist article and letter for this magazine.
Influenced by Manushi, I wrote my first English poem:
Inside the Four Walls
Inside the four walls you will hear
Cracking of fire splinters
Scrubbing of utensils, floors
Crying, wailing of hungry babies
Followed by hushing.
Inside the four walls you will hear
Thuds, jerks, beatings
And growling of male voice
A faint voice pleading
Moaning, sighing and dying.
Who knows what goes on inside the four walls!
Inside the wall of a ‘secure home’ she is to fall.
. . . except those martyrs unheard and unsung.
Pleading from societal graves their daughters to waken!
Even though the politics of gender began to make sense to me, I was not yet politically sensitive. I was not even aware of the reason behind the India–Pakistan war of 1971. All I knew was that when the siren sounded, we had to make sure all lights were switched off and the entire area was pitch-black. This was to prevent Pakistani warplanes from spotting us.
I remember listening to a speech by Indira Gandhi in 1975. Her helicopter had landed on the grounds of IIT Kanpur amid great anticipation. Around the same time, I had overheard some students in the IIT hostel whispering about the presence of laal bhaiyas which, I later learnt, meant Naxalites. I had heard them talking about Mao Zedong and the Naxalite movement. The lower clerical staff and radical students fondly remembered the leftist professor A.P. Shukla who used to fight for their rights on campus. He used to say that IIT was a white elephant, where students from all over India came to study for a government-subsidized fee but after graduation went off to serve the cause of American imperialism. I was told that Professor Shukla had been imprisoned and tortured during the Emergency.
Every summer, we used to go back home to Kathmandu. I remember asking my father one day in 1972, when I was thirteen years old: ‘Father, who do you like, Indira Gandhi or Mao Zedong?’ Instead of answering my question, he said, ‘Do not ask such questions.’ That put an end to my political inquiry for the time being. Looking back, I realized that none of us was introduced to politics during his lifetime. At that time, King Birendra ruled Nepal with absolute power but under the disguise of a party-less Panchayat system. Perhaps my father’s loyalties towards the monarch prevented him from answering my question.
This book is not a defence of Ayurveda. A sound, scientific framework of healthcare that has saved countless lives over 5000 years does not need defenders. It needs champions, and to be given wings. In a world that needs Ayurveda more than ever, Dr G.G. Gangadharan, who has been researching both the theory and the practice for the past thirty-five years, shows in his book the logic behind the science.
Let us take a look into some essential tips from this book, so that you can find the secret to greater happiness through balance and long-lasting health.
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Ayurveda||Dr G.G. Gangadharan
The plant that the West calls Rauwolfia serpentina is known in Ayurveda as ‘sarpagandha’. Ayurveda has been using it for centuries for the treatment of high blood pressure without any side-effects. Modern scientists have researched this plant and identified a master molecule named reserpine. They extracted it
from the plant, synthesized it in a laboratory and used it to make medicines that would reduce blood pressure. The medicine achieved this objective, but also caused side-effects that included depression and suicidal tendencies.* After many fatal incidents, the medicine had to be retracted from the market.
There’s a larger story behind this phenomenon—what I call the ‘Sarpagandha Syndrome’. To understand this story, we need to know how nature works and how Ayurveda has moulded itself to fit into nature’s contours.
Nature, Wholeness and the Dynamic Equilibrium
We know that nature abhors a vacuum. Let’s also acknowledge that nature abhors the lack of wholeness. At every point in time since the formation of our planet, every life form and substance found in nature has remained in a state of dynamic equilibrium— within itself and also with respect to its environment. If there is a momentary imbalance in that—for instance, if an unstable isotope is created—nature quickly restores the substance to its whole and natural state.
Meanwhile, nature uses chemistry to change biology over vast periods of time, so that every life form continuously evolves to a higher level of resilience.
Since nature sets such exacting standards for itself, is there any wonder that Ayurveda trusts it implicitly? By extension, Ayurveda trusts every plant and human body to be whole and complete. In the human body, this dynamic equilibrium is maintained by, among other phenomena, homeostasis; Claude Bernard, the father of experimental physiology, called this self-regulating ability the milieu interior. Since the human body and other natural life forms are designed this way, any imbalance in the human body—that manifests as a disease—can be addressed by using the restorative power of nature.
When we take a step back and look at the entire universe, we realize that nature is awe-inspiring. We realize that every life form is a microcosm of the entire universe. Since humans tend to be self-obsessed, let us rewrite that sentence as follows: The human body is a microcosm of the entire universe. The matter of the universe is in the human body and what is in the human body is in the universe. After all, astronomy tells us that the atoms that make up our body were produced inside a star. We share chemistry with the universe and, therefore, everything we find in it is potentially therapeutic for us.
So for the vaidya—the practitioner of Ayurveda—our planet is a boundless pharmacy. This makes the vaidya a bridge connecting the whole nature with the whole human being.
We will now look at how Ayurveda embraces the wholeness of the plant while also treating the human being in its entirety. In simpler terms, Ayurveda does not reduce a plant to its constituent bio-molecules. Nor does it reduce the human being to a set of ailing organs. Life is undoubtedly enabled by molecules and organs, but life is experienced in its entirety. Therefore, the processes that nurture and preserve life must be wholesome.
The first sign that Ayurveda is wholesome is the fact that its medicines do not cause side-effects if used appropriately.
No Side-Effects
Yes, Ayurvedic medicines cause no side-effects. The brazenness of this claim is made apparent by the fact that many allopathic medicines have a list of side-effects that’s longer than the list of chemicals used to make them. Despite painstaking research that can last years—including clinical trials on various life forms and multiple iterations of development—allopathic medicines have been unable to shrug off the bane of unwanted externalities. Take antibiotics, for example—every generation of antibiotics is made stronger so as to vanquish newer generations of more resilient superbugs. This also means that every new generation of antibiotics takes a stronger toll on the human body, with the side effects becoming starker. In such a dynamic domain, Ayurveda continues to use medicines free of side-effects, conceptualized and created many centuries ago. How has Ayurveda achieved this?
Well, Ayurveda studies plants in their entirety. Roots, stems, bark, flowers, fruits and leaves are understood—as constituent yet interconnected parts of the plant—and the therapeutic value of each part is understood. That done, Ayurveda identifies the best way to extract the plant’s essence for human use.
Any part of any plant has hundreds of types of bio-molecules, such as alkaloids and saponins. In many cases, only one bio-molecule among these is capable of acting as the master molecule that combats the ailment. While allopathy will isolate, extract and synthesize this bio-molecule, Ayurveda will extract the
entire part because it believes that the other bio-molecules in the plant negate the side-effects caused by just one of them.
This throws new light on the Sarpagandha Syndrome mentioned earlier. The plant sarpagandha behaves like a team, whereas reserpine behaves like the star player of that team, who is completely lost without his teammates.
The long and short of it is that Ayurveda trusts nature’s design to be more holistic than its counterpart, the human design, and by embracing nature’s holism, it manages to do away with potential side-effects.
Having said that, let’s make another statement that, which at first glance, may appear contradictory: We don’t take all parts of the plant or even everything within a single part of the plant.
All we are saying is that molecular-level selection of matter leads to problems. So, in Ayurveda, the vaidya removes those parts of the plant that are neither necessary for treatment, nor easily ingested by the human body. Through well-considered extraction methodologies, the physician makes the therapeutic qualities of the plant accessible to humans.
Sarbpreet Singh left the shores of his homeland, Sikkim, and went to America in his early twenties. When he learned about the lives of the Gurus, the trials and tribulations they faced, and the glorious story of the Sikh Empire, he felt his spirit soar like it never had before. Following his interest, in The Story of the Sikhs, he penned down the rich historical context that defined the foundational principles which guided Sikhs during the era of each Guru.
Here’s an excerpt from his book about Guru Nanak, who spent his entire life fighting injustice, superstition and ritualism, passing of the torch to Guru Angad.
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The Story of the Sikhs || Sarbpreet Singh
One winter’s night, during heavy rainfall, a part of the wall of the Guru’s house collapsed. The commotion woke up the household, including both of his sons. Several of the Guru’s most devout Sikhs also gathered, many sleepily rubbing their eyes, shivering under the coarse shawls they had tossed around their shoulders to ward off the rain and the cold. The Guru decreed that the wall be fixed immediately!
There was much hemming and hawing and shuffling of feet. Some wondered privately if the Guru was going senile. Finally his sons mustered the courage to speak. ‘It is past midnight father and bitterly cold. Please go back to bed. In the morning we will engage a mason and labourers and take care of this.’ The Guru merely looked at the group and said, ‘Why do I need masons and labourers when I have all of you?’ Everyone breathed a sigh of relief when Lehna stepped up, inwardly laughing at his foolishness. After all, what was the need to repair the wall at once?
Lehna got to work under the watchful eye of his master as the rest of the Sikhs, including Sri Chand and Lakhmi Das, returned to their warm beds. Lehna diligently rebuilt a large section of the wall and found the Guru looking over his shoulder as he worked. ‘It is crooked Lehna,’ said the Guru. Without a moment’s hesitation Lehna tore down the wall and started again. This time the Guru let him build it and examined it critically when it was finished. ‘You built it in the wrong spot Lehna! You are going to have to move the wall.’ Uncomplaining, Lehna threw down the wall and started to build it for the third time.
It was dawn by then and the Sikhs began to wake up. Some gathered around Guru Nanak’s house watching Lehna work. Finally, when the wall was completed, the Guru once again expressed dissatisfaction and commanded Lehna to tear it down yet again. Some of the Sikhs began to titter. The Guru’s sons mocked Lehna, calling him a fool for obeying such unreasonable orders. Lehna went back to his work unperturbed.
Lehna continued to serve his master for three more years in this manner. Guru Nanak grew increasingly fond of Lehna and spent a lot of time instructing him. The Guru’s sons had grown jealous of Lehna’s deepening relationship with their father and began to openly express their dislike for him. The Guru, sensing the depth of the animosity, decided to send Lehna away to Khadur. Of course, his disciple left with no hesitation and started to live a disciplined life of prayer and meditation in his hometown, garnering great respect from the locals. Although he was distraught at being separated from his master, he never complained, certain that Guru Nanak must have had a reason for sending him away…
Finally came the fateful day when the Guru assembled everyone on the banks of the Ravi and formally anointed Angad as his successor.
14 June 1539 was a warm summer’s day in Punjab. A strange scene unfolded on the banks of the river Ravi, which flows by the town of Kartarpur. Guru Nanak was surrounded by his family and his beloved Sikhs, but he was doing something most unusual, even disconcerting. Surely unbefitting an elderly patriarch whose followers loved him and respected him like none other, Guru Nanak rose from his seat—the Guru’s seat—and to it he led Angad, who looked embarrassed and nonplussed. Guru Nanak, with a reassuring smile, gestured towards the Guru’s seat and bid Angad to sit. Angad looked reluctant, but being the most obedient of his master’s followers, he gingerly lowered himself into the seat. To the assembly’s astonishment, Guru Nanak reverently placed an offering of five paise or pennies and a coconut before his disciple and prostrated himself before him. The assembly gasped audibly. The Guru rose and turned to Bhai Buddha, another of his beloved disciples, a solemn man, who had been known as ‘Buddha’ or the wise old man, since he was a precocious lad! Bhai Buddha, on the Guru’s command, anointed Bhai Lehna’s forehead with a Tilak or saffron mark, signifying royalty. The torch had been passed. Visibly and dramatically. The humblest of Guru Nanak’s disciples, Bhai Lehna, now known as Guru Angad, was now his successor.
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Now that you have had a glimpse of the life of Guru Nanak, who had paved the path of spirituality for many, read in detail more about other Sikh Gurus in Sarbpreet Singh’s The Story of the Sikhs.
Brands, in what they show, tell, feel, smell and taste like, say a lot. Our five senses play a significant role in the recognition of a brand and how it is received by the audience. Sandeep Dayal tells how brain sciences can help brand ambassadors and brand theatres of operations engage the human senses. It would be right to say that all the cognitive brand marketers must note the finer nuances for branding that this book offers.
Let us read this extract from his book to understand that when designing and executing brand experiences, it is important to think of a plan for each sense, or at least consider its impact on them.
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Right Between the Ears || Sandeep Dayal
Most real-world brands have a ‘theatre of operations’ and ‘ambassadors’. They go to market through retail stores and/or a salesforce.
Sergio Zyman was the chief marketing officer of the Coca-Cola Company when they sponsored the Summer Olympics in Atlanta in 1996. Years later, I was Sergio’s chief marketing officer in his consulting company. Sergio told me that at the time when he ran the sponsorship for the Olympics, he had his teams build a thick binder called the ‘Red Book’, which was a detailed playbook for everything that Coke would do at the games. How and where Coke would be seen, who would do and say what and when, what it all meant and how it fit together in a single brand mosaic.
The Olympics would be Coke’s theatre of operation. Anyone with the red Coke shirt would be a brand ambassador, and every moment would be choreographed according to the Red Book.
When consumers step into a brand’s theatre of operations or interact with its brand ambassadors, there is an opportunity to build immersive experiences for them by engaging their five senses. The strongest brand experiences, as we learnt before, are those that are associated with other prior experiences. They are recalled more easily and better than others, last longer and feel more important to the brain. When marketers weave their brands with the human senses, they create even more associations with the experience, making it easier to recall. That’s why immersive sensory brand experiences make deep impressions on our brains.
If you walk down the Magnificent Mile in Chicago, even if you have never done that before, you can recognize the Burberry store with its trademark black-and-brown tartan cross hatches from blocks away with no help at all. The store design itself makes a statement about the brand. As you step inside, you can smell it.
During spring and summer, Zaluti scent machines diffuse the spring crocus scent and during autumn and winter, a special autumn scent. You look around and see that the wall colors are neutral with darker accents and furniture. That is deliberately orchestrated to bring to mind Burberry’s classic trench coat or tartan.
The personal shopper who greets you leaves an impression with how they look and sound, and how they gently direct you to where you want to go in the store. Every one of those sensations embody the Burberry brand.
The brand theatre of operations does not end with the store. Burberry also live-streams its runway shows, to share the excitement of decloaking new fashions as they happen with its fans worldwide, and lets them buy select new products online with its ‘see now, buy now strategy’.
Even brands like Away, Glossier, Farmer’s Dog, Made In Cookware, Lively Intimates and Everlane, which started out as pure online brands, have opened exciting stores on Lafayette Street in New York. They realized that bringing people to a brick-and-mortar store was the best way to create immersive experiences for customers—and that is what many consumers want. Virtual companies like Facebook and Google have opportunities to expand their brand theatre of operations into the real world with events and sponsorships.
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Read Sandeep Dayal’s Right Between the Ears to get insights into the fascinating world of branding and hold on to the anchors in the age of hyper-competition by understanding why people make the choices they do and how to keep a brand relevant.
In his book Believe, Suresh Raina takes us through the challenges he faced as a young cricketer. He was bullied in school and at cricket camps, but he always punched above his weight, overcoming every adversity life threw at him and never giving up. This is the story of the lessons he learnt and the friendships he built.
Peppered with invaluable insights – about the game and about life – that Raina acquired from senior colleagues like M.S. Dhoni, Rahul Dravid, Anil Kumble, Sachin Tendulkar and Sourav Ganguly, among others, this book will make you believe in the power of hard work, love, luck, hope and camaraderie. It is a journey through the highs and lows in the cricketing career of a man who saw his world fall apart and yet became one of the most influential white-ball cricketers India has ever seen.
Enjoy this little excerpt that explores his relationship with the legend M.S. Dhoni.
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Believe||Suresh Raina, Bharat Sundaresan
Mahi Bhai always makes fun of me for being clumsy. I’ve seen him talk about how if I am around in his room, I would end up dropping something or walking into something. ‘Tu rahega toh kuch na kuch hoga,’ he likes to say. Maybe there’s some truth there. I am just a very energetic person, and I am always up and about as you might have seen me on the field.
There’s another thing that he is amused by. He’ll talk about how I would saunter into his room, order a lot of food over room service and not even wait for it to arrive. I’ll tell you why I am always keen on ordering my own food. What happens with a lot of them is that they would order nothing but chicken and roti. I, on the other hand, am a vegetarian. Moreover, I never have maida, because back home, I was used to having rotis made of ragi atta. My eating habits are pretty desi, so I need a good number of vegetable dishes and can’t do without a dal.
So, Mahi would ask me to order my own food. But often, after ordering, I would remember that I had a gym session and end up not eating that food. But I made it a point to not waste it and would go back later for it, even if by then the food had gone cold.
Talking of room service always reminds me of the times Robin Uthappa and I would order food on Mahi Bhai’s tab. And of that time in Pakistan when Rahul Bhai was captain and said, ‘Boys, order whatever you want. It’s on me.’ We made him pay for that reckless statement.
It involved, me, Irfan, Robin and Mahi Bhai. It was Dhoni’s idea. He just called up room service and asked for a double of everything we had ordered. Two milkshakes, an extra biryani, two extra rotis, two more dals, two more sabzis. Rahul Bhai couldn’t stop laughing at us. He eventually admitted that he’d learnt his lesson and that he would never give us a free hand again with room service. We did end up finishing everything we’d ordered, though.
That’s the kind of fun Mahi Bhai and I would have at other people’s expense all the time. We are like partners in crime when it comes to pulling someone else’s leg. I’ve been at the receiving end too at times, when he decides to turn on me. We’ve had an interesting relationship over the years.
I have also gone through so much because of our friendship. Like the whole bias angle. People would say, ‘Oh, Raina gets picked because he is Dhoni’s friend.’ But people forget the contributions I have made for teams captained by him—India as well as CSK. That’s how you build trust in a player as captain.
For us, it was like how when you have a neighbour over at your place all the time. You can take liberties with that person, saying yeh toh ghar ki baat hai. I played so much of my career down the order, and he would say let some of the others play at the top. At times I would say, ‘Humein bhi upar khelna hai.’ But he would respond, ‘Nahi, tu at will chhakke marta hai . . .’ and say that the others, be it Rohit or Virat or Ajju (Ajinkya Rahane), were better off at the top of the order. I was more reliable in those situations. He knew my mindset. He knew what brought the best out of me. And I trusted him. It would hurt when people kept linking our friendship to my being part of the team. I don’t think the numbers lie. I’ve always earned my spot in the team, just like I earned Mahi Bhai’s trust and respect. I was there for him. He always made me feel special. Nobody can take away from that. And it doesn’t matter what people say . . .
We grew closer and closer, and even got to know a lot about each other’s personal lives and families. I went to his house and met his family. After meeting them, I realized why he is so sorted. Sakshi and he came to meet my parents soon after their wedding. A UP–Bihar cultural connection there as well.
There’s always a lot of talk about Mahi Bhai being Captain Cool. But I can tell you that is not his greatest strength as captain. He will never compromise on the game. That’s what I like about him the most. That’s what I think makes him such a legendary captain and a fantastic leader.
The Spirit of Enquiry by Carnatic vocalist and writer T.M. Krishna has a spectacular piece on the legendary singer S.P. Balasubrahmanyam that highlights the range and depth in SP’s music and how his brilliance came from being musically selfless. Read on for a glimpse!
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SPB happens!
SPB was in love, surprised, joyous, excited, fearful, sad, contemptuous and disgusted. He was the father, son, lover, brother, friend, villain and hero. He was the voice of the privileged and the questioning voice of the oppressed and marginalized. He was an urbanite, a villager and could belong to any era. In his voice we found every social, cultural and aesthetic possibility. This allowed every individual, irrespective of their sociopolitical location, to find himself/herself within his voice at one time or another. This self identification gave SPB a universalism that has eluded every other Indian playback singer. And I would like to stress with extra emphasis that no other ‘voice’ in Indian film history has belonged to such a diverse cross-section of Indian society.
SPB came from a certain social construction and to be able to debaggage that in his work would have been impossible, unless he was able to leave S.P. Balasubrahmanyam the person behind the moment
he stood in front of the mike. SPB had an instinctive way of tapping into various cultures and demographics. This is emotional insight of the highest order and difficult to explain. For all other singers, there was and is a social-range limit to their voice.
There is one possible answer to this mystery. Great musicians are those who listen carefully, attentively and receive with respect. Listening is not limited to music; it is as much about accent, dialect and pronunciation. It is beyond listening in the sonic sense; it includes learning varied body languages, internalizing social contexts and realities. SPB seems to have been able to absorb this from all that he witnessed in life. In other words, he let life imbue his musicality. Therefore, when he sang a song, it had a larger story to tell; not just the one being communicated by the director, music director, cinematographer or actor. SPB’s voice became the voice of the idea. He abstracted the song from the specificity of the film and made it a human calling.
If there is one indicator of the nuance in his listening, it is in the way he enunciated the words in a song. Most people do not realize that pronouncing a word is entirely different from singing it. As a part of music, the word becomes a musical body and its highs, lows, elongation and emphasis undergo a subtle but crucial transformation. Only if these happen will the music flow. Added to this complication is the fact that these alterations are language-, dialect- and culture specific. In other words, depending on the character SPB was singing for, the musical word had a specific etched acoustic form. And SPB gave every musical word, phrase and line the social, political and aesthetic identity it demanded.
The Spirit of Enquiry || T.M. Krishna
Such a person had to be selfless, musically. This comes from a realization of one’s role that as a musician, one is a catalyst and not an originator. When you are a bridge between people, ideas and feelings, ‘I’—the individual identity—has to become invisible. This sounds very close to an actor’s reality, but is actually much harder to accomplish. The actor enters the secondary reality of the film using the character he is playing, separating himself from the role. The two realities are clearly demarcated.
On the other hand, the playback singer comes in momentarily to lend his voice. In the studio, away from any semblance of the cinematic reality, he needs to give life to an idea, keeping in mind the described context, the actor’s image and the music director’s composition. And while adhering to all these requirements, he needs to somehow find his own bearings.
SPB lived selflessly, transcending the imagination of all these people but yet put aside the craving for the ‘spotlight’. He realized that the ‘self’ is established when it forgets its own presence.
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For the first time, T.M. Krishna’s key writings have been put together in this extraordinary collection. The Spirit of Enquiry: Dissent as an Art Form draws from his rich body of work, thematically divided into five key sections: art and artistes; the nation state; the theatre of secularism; savage inequalities; and in memoriam.
