Book Review #141 : Forgiveness Is a Choice

 

Imprint: Ebury Press

Published: Dec/2021

ISBN: 9780143450573

Length: 224 Pages

MRP: ₹299.00

The words such as forgiveness and peace have always represented abstract ideas and thoughts, something to be understood by the intellect rather than a viable experience. Kia, however, provides a more integrated wisdom that allows moving such concepts from the head to the heart. A potentially life changing approach with a deeper understanding of why I suffer, and how to gently let go, and later the realization of the true nature of things is presented in this beautiful book. 

Forgiveness, a priceless gift from the beloved presence dwelling within our hearts, is like a soothing balm for healing all our wounds. The pain we feel when we lose our home or other material possessions. The pain we experience in our body when we face a physical illness. The pain of separation from a loved one – from loss due to death of the body or the death of a relationship – so that our beloved is no longer part of our everyday social fabric. The pain we feel when we believe we have disappointed someone we love by our actions, or when we feel a sense of shame or regret and judge ourselves as failures.

We need the comforting presence of forgiveness to dry all our tears. Whenever we feel lost, confused, lonely, upset or disconnected, a steady practice of forgiveness anchors us in the truth of our being—a changeless, timeless, deathless, and birth less reality that is pure peace, love, and joy. In our fast-paced lives mired in space, time, and form where the only thing that is constant is change, forgiveness helps us shift our perspective, so we see our situation differently. Herein lies the true gift and healing that forgiveness offers. It is a medicine that we take and allow it to work inside us at a pace that is comfortable for us; we cannot and must not rush this process. However, it is our choice that only we can make. Only we have the power to choose forgiveness. While it may seem that we are forgiving another person or situation, in reality, it is we that are in most need of forgiveness.

The conscious choice made to not allow an unpleasant event to become frozen in our minds and hearts, but, to allow all the painful emotions to flush up in a safe space; the anger, the sadness, the hurt, the confusion – all must be bought into awareness. Only then can we go deeper into the peace, love, and joy that are buried underneath. This inner sanctuary of peace, love, and light can never be hurt or taken away from us. It is our treasure to claim hidden right underneath all the pain and darkness. And forgiveness can light our way, so we may fully allow this healing to truly wash over us, so we may feel whole once more – perhaps even stronger and more resilient than before. When we begin to practice forgiveness, the world becomes a better place to live. Forgiveness is essential to releasing fear and living in peace. In fact, forgiveness is the single most important thing we can do to create a life of love and happiness. This is the essence and teaching of this book.

This book is a practical guide to forgiveness. It reveals how we unconsciously carry old wounds into our daily lives, and then guides us through a simple process for identifying and releasing these emotions. An everyday approach to identifying hurts and angers in the moment and releasing them through forgiveness allows us to lead happier and stress-reduced lives.

The usage of simple words and lucid language helps to maintain coherence throughout the book. It is a manual for hard times - a gem, indeed! Anytime I'm unsettled, I know, I will turn to this book to feel grounded again. An inspiring book you MUST get. Also, a worthy gift you can give to anyone you love and care for. 

Review copy courtesy – PR, Penguin Random House India.

A Work In Progress!

We were supposed to have it all figured out by now, weren’t we?

We were supposed to know exactly what we wanted and exactly how to get it by now, isn’t that what we were told about being an adult? And then life happened.

As we got older we slowly realized that 95% of what we thought we were supposed to have figured out by now wasn’t anything close to what life is really about. Because the lives we are living are not finite. They are not written in stone. They are not stagnant. They are not about breaking through a certain threshold.

Our lives are one massive, gigantic, and sometimes overwhelming work in progress. There will never come a time when we are complete and finished human beings because the state of being complete and finished is the antithesis of what being human is all about.

Life is malleable. It is constantly throwing new things our way. Life is more a continuous learning experience than anything else. And, this is the way life will always be.

But this is not about how nothing is ever good enough or things are never finished. Products are finished. Books are finished. That project at work that everyone hated was finished. 

There will never be a time in this life where everything makes complete sense. There will never be a time in this life where we won’t struggle at least a little bit. There will never be a time in this life where we are finished working on ourselves. There will never be a time in this life where we have everything figured out. These things will never come to pass because existing consciously necessitates work.

There will always be things that we can get better at. There will always be things that challenge us. There will always be mistakes that we want to correct.

Though the idea of every person on this earth being a continual work in progress may seem daunting, it’s important to understand that this will always be the case. There is no finished state to a human being. And it is the act of understanding this reality that keeps us open to life and the possibilities that come from accepting the nature of being human.

The second we feel like we have everything figured out is the second that we no longer give life the chance to change our minds or enlighten us. The second we feel like we are no longer a work in progress is the second we stop making progress.

And the most progress is often made when we are among our hopes and dreams and side projects and things that inspire us and things we want to change for the better. It is among these things where life exists in its purest form. And it is among these things where we usually realize we are a work in progress and we will always be a work in progress.

As unsettling as this idea might be, it is surely one of life’s most important challenges to understand that everything about who we are is not finite and will continue to evolve and grow as time continues to pass. It would probably be a much easier existence if this wasn’t the case, but the world would be substantially worse off if our lives weren’t a continual work in progress.

My Advice To Indian Teenage Girls!

I wish I knew some of these things in my teens or early twenties, my life would have been completely different. It takes a great deal of understanding to assimilate this post. I hope it helps!

1. Don't be like men. You are different. You are unique. You are a female and there is a difference. What do you do when you see pigs lying in the gutter? Will you go lie with them or you clean the place and make it habitable for the rest of you? Trying to imitate men in the name of equality is not a way to be.

2. If you want to, imitate good men, men that are a good mix of masculine and feminine, men that you want to be the father of your kids. Would you be proud of a father who drinks, smokes, is always concerned about his looks, men who belittle other men, is critical of everything and is financially irresponsible or too much into money, career, competition etc. Don't be like men, be a woman which men want to be like, who is a safe place for men to come to when they are done fighting their battles, women whom even men look up to.

3. Ladies, learn to distinguish between different kinds of attention. You don't want to be someone's past time, you should be someone people show reverence for. When they see you, they are filled with love and respect. They want their daughters to be like you. They want to have you not just in their beds but in their homes, in their hearts, in their life forever. 

4. As a woman, do not pull others down on your way up. When you reach to the top, give your hand to pull other women up. A community of empowered women is much needed to raise the collective consciousness of the society as a whole. Every time you belittle a woman, you expose an insecure part of yourself, learn to work on it.

5. A major reason for attracting toxic partners and tolerate shit is your deep seated insecurities. Your self worth should not depend on how beautiful and successful you are, how many men find you beautiful, how popular you are. Just your existence is worth a million bucks, you don't need to be “something” to be worthy of love and respect. Do not tolerate disrespect, abuse, toxicity to compensate for your imagined shortcomings.

6. Acknowledge the quiet guy sitting in the corner who you think is boring and under confident. He could be the one for you, give him a chance. Try to communicate with all kinds of people, know them, first impression is often the wrong impression.

7. Shed all the concepts that the society taught you. Unlearn. One of which is a concept of “independence”. No one is completely independent, we are all inter-dependent on each other. Having an income is great but don't try to do anything and everything all by yourself, it is exhausting, ask for help whenever you need. Feeling unsafe? Ask your brother to drop you, want to lift an heavy object? Ask your husband, men opening doors for you? Appreciate. Asking for help will not take away your independence. Similarly, don't misuse your financial independence as an excuse to feel superior, being rebellious, immature and outspoken. Learn to use your intuition and wisdom in every situation. Learn balance of everything!

8. Don't tolerate mediocre things in life. Recognize the divinity within you. It has nothing to with size, color of your skin, clothes you wear, feminine is innate to our existence, our bodies are perfect ground for seeds of femininity to sprout, when in tune with our divinity, we are more at peace, more patient, more grounded, sensual, full of love, compassion, empathy. People can't help getting drawn towards us. No, it is not submission, not helplessness, not cowardice rather opposite, it is empowering, it is liberating, it is fearless way of living.

9. When in self doubt, look into the mirror and for once just once try to look beyond the physical, beyond your thin hairs and thick nose, beyond your saggy skin and bat wings, beyond your love handles and thunder thighs. Beyond the superficial color your skin, you are a divine being radiating colorful lights, encompassing the entire universe within you. You are just that, nothing less. See it, embrace it. Be it. 

Love. 

Haiku #24 ~ Ph.D

HAIKU : A poetry form, with three lines. The first being 5 syllables, the second 7, then 5 in the third.

The first months are hard,

As time passes, the growth becomes visible,

Then the results shine out. 

Book Review #136: The Second Life : An Anthology of 25 Life Changing Stories

Paperback: 224 pages

Publisher: Write India Publishers; first edition (10 October 2014)

Language: English

An awesome compilation of unique stories and they titled it so apt as 'The Second Life'. Take my words some characters of the stories will not leave you forever. All the writers have given their best work here, you will echo my views when you read the stories. I have a story named 'In The Classroom of Life' too. Here is the list of story names and their authors. 

Each story has its own flavour. While some are as sweet as a cold breeze, a few are upbeat and thought provoking. It is a highly recommended book with the right ingredients for everyone.

It's a collection of beautiful heart touching stories that can change even the reader's perspective about life. Only few books have this power, and this is one of them.

A particular story that stood out to me and stirred my soul was 'The Hug of Allah and Ishwar'. It left me wondering about the hypocrisy we live in. The religion that teaches us the way to ultimate peace, we use the same religion as a reason to kill. Shameful.

An inspiring book you must get. A worthy gift you can give to anyone. 

Ratings: 5/5

Ph.D : An Academic Adventure Of A Lifetime!

The PhD-as-journey becomes a way of telling self and others the story of the PhD process and the various experiences, emotions, and challenges that come along the way. The notion of the journey sums up the sense of movement, personal growth and change! Here are my learnings/observations and narrations of the ups and downs of my journey until now:

1. Patience & ability to deal with pressure

PhD can be really frustrating and there may be times you would feel like just giving up. Even though you may have completed the work from your end there are so many other factors that influence your progress. That is why you need patience and lots of it-

• The supervisor might not be available, dates for presentations, meetings might be difficult to secure. Comments from advisors could take too long or they could join some other institute mid-way.
• If you are getting the results and publications in time (what you and your supervisor have planned), then you are in a good phase of the Ph.D. And, here is your chance to make best out of it. However, for some reasons, if you are lagging then again pressure builds.
• Papers you send for publications could sometimes take months. It could be an endless process of rejections, reviews and revisions before you can finally get published.
• Getting married while doing PhD is not easy with the lack of time and less money from stipend. All this while your friends who could be graduates have good jobs and have been promoted and even have kids.
• Dealing with the pressure that comes with family and relatives constantly asking you about when are you completing your PhD.
• Holidays are rare and even then you might have to work. The only time you really get to travel is during conferences. Even that is impossible now due to Covid-19 situation.
• You might be a teaching assistant or taking classes or organizing conferences or doing some other work which will take up more of your time.

Basically, doing Ph.D. is an art of handling the pressure, and if you are good in that, then you will find less frustration. However, if you're unable to handle the load, then you will learn it during the Ph.D. And, undoubtedly, you will master the things (like pressure handling to minimize the frustration level) that can help you to grow your career. There is plenty of time to learn, improve and emerge. 

2. Drive + Humility + Hard work

It could take you anywhere between 3 to 6 years to complete your PhD. If you are not driven, it could be easy to slip into lethargy and depression as you counter setbacks on the way. You might waste valuable energy and lose focus. Treat every setback as a bump in the road.

The transition from student to scholar is the primary task of a doctoral journey. It involves learning how to (a) read and critically interpret the original works of important theorists and researchers contained in the literature of your field, (b) design and conduct research projects of your own (such as the dissertation), and (c) write in a style and voice acceptable to other scholars. 

So while you need to be driven to progress forward, you also need to be patient knowing it would still take time. This combination of drive-patience quality is tough but so important to achieve.

3. People skills

Although a lot of your PhD work involves you working alone in your lab or cubicle or home, it also involves interaction and working with others.

The most important is your relation with your supervisor. A supervisor might be kind and helpful but might not have enough knowledge in your area to help you a lot. Or your supervisor might be a genius and very knowledgeable but might have a nature that makes it difficult to work with them. It is up to you to figure out the best way to work with them as everyone has a different kind of personality and this relationship lasts for years and involves constantly working with them.

Besides your supervisor, there are also committee members with whom you may need to interact at times. Networking is important as you might need to take help from other colleagues, juniors or seniors for your PhD work or for collaborating to publish a paper together.

So although it is your PhD - that of an individual, it is never achieved without the involvement of a lot of different people and that is why people skills are necessary- knowing how to work and what works best with them.

4. (Mis)Using the freedom

The nicest part of a PhD is the freedom. The worst part is the freedom. Understand this! You have to be wise with how you use your time and make the most of the opportunity to study and research something you’re passionate about. A PhD student who understands this difference separates himself/herself from the rest automatically!

P.S: 

1. There are days when you don't understand something or you don't get desired results in this journey. Similarly, there are days when you might get scolded for no fault of yours. All these things are frustrating but if you were to look at it, these things happen in almost any career. 

2. Ph.D is an endurance test. So, even with all these aspects, enjoying the doctorate journey is what matters the most. It will have its share of ups and downs. How you handle them will determine whether you succeed or fail in your quest.

9 Things Every Girl Should Know Early On In Life!

1. About taxes, savings, and being independent
2. Basic cooking
3. How to take one’s mental health seriously
4. Spare some ME time!
5. Never change for someone until you no longer recognize yourself
6. Take care of your skin since a young age, your skin will thank you later!
7. Never settle just because you are a certain age..
8. Know the difference between a man who flatters you, compliments you and the man who spends money on you, who invests in you. Know the difference between a man who views you as a property and a man who views you properly, a man who lusts after you and a man who loves you, be with a man who believes you are a gift to him!
9. Accept yourself, the way you are. Love yourself, unapologetically!

Two Best Reasons To Wake Up Early!

1. Better concentration & enhanced productivity: Brains tend to be most alert in the morning. Starting your day early improves your concentration. In addition to being able to focus on goals and task lists without being interrupted by family members or coworkers, getting up early means that by the time you get to work or school, you’ve had (EXTRA) hours to properly acclimate yourself to the day.

2. You have more time on your hands! So, the way we rush for everything is insane! We rush to jump buses, trains, rush to work, rush breakfast. It is always a rat race. Waking up early makes it very easy to plan your life. I mean, while the world is rushing to make breakfast, you are already done with that and at a much more relaxed pace too. You’ll be more alert during peak hours, as a result, you’ll get more done!

Book Review #123 : 'Til Health Do Us Part

In this well-crafted memoir, author Rooney chronicles her journey towards holistic wellness as she healed from a host of debilitating diseases and her family falling apart.

She introduces readers to her past through flashbacks—physical and sexual abuse as a child, her joyful marriage disintegrating as her husband’s career progressed, and dozens of doctors piling on diagnoses and medications. In 2010, Rooney’s life took a life-altering turn when she moved to Hawaii and met Xavier, a shrewd, composed Eastern healer who guided her towards health with constant probing. Xavier’s enduring patience with her fuels her sense of humor which allows her to express her true feelings. With his help, she thrived and separated herself from the toxic environment of her family, established a healthy diet, and learned to nurture herself. But the biggest hurdle was weaning herself from the heavy medications she had become dependent on for years. As she made monumental strides to improve physically, she also engaged in the grueling emotional work of overcoming the pattern of self-destruction rooted in an inability to love herself. 

The author takes you through her personal transformation, kicking & screaming, as she experiences her awakening realizing that her choices are creating her reality. This book is a soul’s journey, a spiritual story, told by a woman as she discovers that the body, mind & breath are all connected. She comes to realize that her emotional state of consciousness is creating her physical challenges. Xavier helps her to connect with that inner voice which becomes the pivotal trigger that propels her forward with confidence in knowing she has established her connection to her essence. 

Rooney’s writing style is genuine and engaging; short chapters keep the pace lively. The chapters usually ended with a statement that enticed me to keep reading. The narrative weaves seamlessly between what is she experiences in Hawaii, her childhood and young adult years, and the years during which her diseases progress. Not even a physician can fix a person if they're not willing to participate in their own healing. She captures Xavier’s advice in memorable stories and phrases, like his observation that in healing, “there’s a point…where you stop swimming away from something and begin to swim towards something.”

Julie’s honest reflection & relationship with her emotional state of mind throughout the process of healing radiated with so much honesty. You can feel her sorrow when she realizes that she needs to listen to & depend on her own intuitive voice in order to go forward & be truly healthy and happy. I'm inspired and uplifted, and the writing, injected with humor and passion, makes this book worth sharing with anyone I know! Her total healing is raw and remarkable. Quite the courageous lady. 

Verdict : An astonishing yet plausible story of recovery told with authenticity and a healthy dose of humor. Would recommend this book to anyone really wanting to understand what true health is all about.

Rating : 5/5

P.S : This book was provided to me in exchange for an honest and unbiased review.

Book Review #115 : IKIGAI

I recently completed reading a very inspiring book — IKIGAI — The Japanese Secret to a Long Happy Life. The book is authored by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles. Today, I am going to talk about my learning from the book. The book touches the various aspects of life which can help us achieve a long happy life. It is based on ancient, well practised Japanese technique called — IKIGAI.

If you google the word, you will get various meanings like : A reason for being, encompassing joy, a sense of purpose and meaning and a feeling of well-being, Or, The word derives from iki, meaning life and kai, meaning the realisation of hopes and expectations. But the one I liked the most is — “A reason to jump out of bed each morning!” This book helps you deep dive into discovering the meaning of your life. It is quite evident that the authors stress more on discovering the meaning of life rather than creating one for you! If you have discovered the meaning of your life, you need to completely immerse into the experience without being distracted by the surroundings and you attain the flow. The book also talks about some very interesting techniques to practice which can help you achieve the flow.

Wabi Sabi Technique:

The book concludes after introducing to another Japanese Technique called — Wabi-Sabi. This techniques talks about finding beauty in imperfect, incomplete things. Here flawed is preferred over perfection. Japanese believe that only imperfect, incomplete and ephemeral things are beautiful because they resemble the nature.

Negatives:

What I found a missed opportunity was the fact that the writers didn’t include a resource list in the book with references. Many of their statements can be backed up with books and studies. I think the addition of sources would have made their message even stronger.

Also, it was sometimes difficult to determine whether the book was about how to get old healthily instead of finding your ikigai. I was imagining sometimes,  is this a book about finding your inner happiness or about healthy aging?

Verdict:

To conclude, I think the book is extremely inspiring and full of content. I could attain my flow while reading it. It is a nice, entertaining book that reads very easily and quickly and can certainly motivate you to live healthier. I wouldn’t go so far by saying that this book will help you to find your own ikigai. This is something very personal and this can be something very big or something very small. This book is not really about that. However, it gives you an idea of how it feels once you’ve found it and explains why it’s so healthy. I can also recommend this book if you’re looking for great insights and inspiration to live healthier and more positive. A great self help book.

Rating: 4/5

P.S: The book was a precious birthday gift.

Book Review #114 : the sun and her flowers

The Sun and Her Flowers, by Rupi Kaur, is perfect for anyone who has recently broken up with someone who did not nurture your soul sufficiently to sprout. For all shattered spirits in search of a safe haven, this poetic collection is nectar to busy little injured bees. In a garden where precious buds are in dire need of water, The Sun and Her Flowers reflects souls who rise above the barriers that hinder their growth. It is a passage between decay, awakening, and healing. Rupi Kaur’s most recent anthology is “the recipe of life.”

Rupi Kaur vividly plays with paradoxical symbols. The book cover contained sunflowers, typically resembling joy and vitality, and its content depicts themes of woe and melancholy. It symbolises the process of regaining light after prolonged, somber nights of despair. Even vibrant and cheerful beings, like sunflowers, can wilt and suffer with scarce nurturing.

The Sun and Her Flowers encompasses an enticing table of contents, akin to a flower cycle: wilting, falling, rooting, rising, and blooming. Each category portrays poems with illustrations done by Kaur herself, relevant to their respective themes.

One of the many reasons to love this book  is its capacity to truly mend and heal broken hearts stuck in despair and darkness. This anthology provides light at the end of the readers’ tunnels, and give hope to souls who consider themselves unfortunate.

If you read her first book (Milk and Honey), it's still in Rupi's signature style, but she manages to cover similar topics from a different standpoint. It kind of feels as though her books are maturing with her, as this one handles the issues from Milk and Honey in a more mature, learned tone.

Even if some of the poems in the sun and her flowers seem like recycled oldies-but-goodies, there's no denying that Kaur is brilliant. She's not afraid to speak her mind and talk about taboo subjects, such as female infanticide, immigration, rape, abuse, mental illness and sexual empowerment. Her poems contain difficult subject matter and can be hard to read, but they all hold a unique power that can and will speak to many people around the world. This leaves readers feeling as though Kaur has gone deep into the depths of their personal lives and put all the heart-wrenching feelings they once felt down on paper.

Reading The Sun and Her Flowers will honestly change your life and your relationships with yourself and others. I am truly looking forward to reading her future publications. Definitely recommend that ALL young women read this, if for no other reason than to see that we are all sharing very similar struggles in love and life in general.

Ratings : 5/5 

Book Review #104 : The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck

The Subtle Art Of Not Giving A F*ck: A Counterintuitive Approach To Living A Good Life, is a good guide to figuring out what you want in life and at work, and how to achieve it. The route to this, Manson believes, lies in not caring too much about everything. Once you give up the need to feel exceptional and be positive and happy all the time, as well as your fear of failure, you will be better off. “The world is constantly telling you that the path to a better life is more, more, more—buy more, own more, make more, f*ck more, be more,” says Manson, who advocates that people focus instead on figuring out what’s important. As Manson puts it, what determines your success is not what you want to enjoy, but how much suffering you’re willing to sustain to get there.

Using his own life as an example in the book, Manson talks about how the pressure to be exceptional led him to drugs and serial womanizing. It’s only when he realized that neither he nor his problems were special that he cleaned up his act and worked towards becoming an entrepreneur. He credits his success to his lack of fear of failure. “Improvement at anything is based on thousands of tiny failures, and the magnitude of your success is based on how many times you’ve failed at something. If someone is better than you at something, then it’s likely because she has failed at it more than you have. If someone is worse than you, it’s likely because he hasn’t been through all the painful learning experiences that you have,” he writes.

The insightful and funny perspectives on life are what make the book well worth a read. It’s full of breezy advice as well as the I’m okay-You’re okay type of transactional analysis. Its success lies in the fact that it’s all very colloquial and conversational, and so easy to digest.

Well I was skeptical, people were saying this book is just a compilation of his blog posts and there's not much new material in here. It's true on some level. But not entirely. The order of chapters and the flow, all paints a bigger picture than reading just his blog.

On a negative side, since this is a compilation of his blog posts, it doesn't flow as well as if he would've written it from scratch. Each new chapter has some level of disconnection from the previous. It doesn't interfere with the experience, but not really. It did bother me.

Feels like, he has a lot more things to say, but hasn't said it. This book a bit very restrictive. More explaining and elaborating would've gone a longer way.

RATING - 4/5 

Follow Your Bliss ...

 

“Follow your bliss ... If you do follow your bliss, you put yourself on a kind of track that has been there all the while, waiting for you, and the life that you ought to be living is the one you are living. When you can see that, you begin to meet people who are in your field of bliss, and they open doors to you. I say, follow your bliss and don’t be afraid, and doors will open where you didn’t know they were going to be.” — Joseph Campbell

Joseph Campbell, who specialized in applying lessons from mythology to modern human experiences, was the first to use the phrase “follow your bliss.” He saw it as an essential part of the formula for living life to the fullest.

In other words, if you do things you are passionate about, you'll feel fully alive and doors will open up for you. Sacred space is an absolute necessity for anybody today. You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day, where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply experience and bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen.

Anyone who is willing to leave the well-trodden path that many before them have traveled and follow their bliss on the road less-traveled can do the same thing. Is it easy to follow your bliss? Of course not; that is why Campbell calls it “the hero’s journey”: You’ll have a chance to encounter every dragon (fear) that lives within the darkest caverns of your mind that wants to keep your life small and safe... and I can attest to that. 

Your re-defining moment doesn’t happen just one time in your life; it happens every time you make a decision to follow your bliss, again, and again, and again. There are new doors awaiting your arrival. The adventure is its own reward — but it’s necessarily dangerous, having both negative and positive possibilities, all of them beyond control.

Having said all this, there are a certain “bliss myths” I want to cover here : 

Myth #1: Following your bliss means simply doing the things that make you happy.

Myth #2: Following your bliss means quitting your day job.

Myth #3: Following your bliss means you’ll be instantly successful and feel blissful all the time.

Myth #4: You only have one bliss. 

Bliss may be defined as a natural direction you can take as a way to maximize your sense of joy, fulfilment, and purpose. Sometimes people equate bliss with being in a state of euphoria, but in reality, being blissful is the state you’re in when you’re doing what brings you a deep sense of joy. When you’re in a blissful state, you’re listening to the voice of your heart. To achieve and maintain a state of bliss, it’s important to be open-minded and to be a risk-taker—walking the road less traveled. 

To seek your own personal bliss, you might wish to sit quietly and meditate about a time in your life when you were the happiest. Remain with that moment, as well as the feelings stirring inside you. When you think you’ve figured out at least one thing that makes you feel blissful, then stay with it. Write about that state. Recording your feelings can help you dig deeper into self-discovery and determine the ways in which you can follow your bliss—always keeping in mind that bliss is a calling that’s calling you. Bliss is a winding road. It is the byproduct of a life well lived. Find your bliss station. Does this idea resonate with you? Let me know in the comments below!

Book Review #102 : The Last Lecture

If you know that you have a very short time of good health, how would you like to spend your time? You want to fulfill your dreams, spend quality time with your family or do what you are best at. Very similar is the case of Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, who has been diagnosed with terminal cancer. He was asked to give a lecture and he couldn’t imagine it to be his last one. Randy said “We cannot change the cards we are dealt, just how we play the hand”. 

This book is inspiring, motivating and can craft the inanimate to life. The author has beautifully combined humor, intelligence, and wisdom. He has exemplified many stories which cover subjects like hard work, team work, sacrifice, self-confidence, modesty, dreaming big, perseverance, positivity, courage and dealing with adversity. For the reader, the book is a glimpse into the life of a dying man who fights every moment to be alive and not a mere story.

He finds himself winning the parent lottery. He was influenced by his loving and supporting parents. During his life, he learnt many lessons from his experiences and has shared them in a striking manner. He also reveals how he achieved his childhood dream of becoming a Disney Imagineer, getting to Zero Gravity, being the coolest guy at amusement park and playing in the National football League (which he never made it).

The book shows a transformational change of his life when he is diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, portrays the changes in his day to day life and how he managed to achieve more in those turbulent times. He always maintained a positive outlook. Pausch loved his wife and children and he expressed it after every slide of his last lecture. He has dedicated his last lecture to his children and concludes by looking forward to sharing his dreams for his children. He recounts that his wife Jai was his caregiver and this means a lot to him. This book makes us feel like family to him, supporting him in his battle against a terminal cancer.

In a chapter entitled, “It’s About How to Live Your Life,” Pausch talks of his cancer and it’s effects on the remainder of his life. He described how he tried to live his life and offered some tips on coping saying “this is what worked for me.” He talks about giving yourself permission to dream big, and achieving your goals. He points out that we all have a finite amount of time and energy and that time spent complaining cannot help us achieve our goals. 

The book is an easy read, that’s packed with a lot of punch. It’s a collection of 61 short stories and is a celebration of a life worth living. Pausch packed a lot of distilled wisdom and knowledge of his 47 years.

There are many nuggets of wisdom interspersed throughout The Last Lecture. 

If you want something bad enough, don’t give up. 

Luck = Preparation + Opportunity. 

Recognize when it’s time to change your strategy. “I signed up for the hardest treatments that could be thrown at me because I wanted to be around as long as possible to be there for my kids.” When Pausch realized that, that was not going to be the case, he changed his strategy to leaving a legacy and spending quality time with his wife and each of his three children. 

Get the fundamentals down for everything. Have you mastered the fundamentals for your job? 

Your attitude affects the outcome of every situation. 

Complaining does not work as a strategy. 

Value people more than you value things. 

While reading The Last Lecture, I gleaned three questions to differentiate us, and I’m still trying to answer them for myself: 

What are three things that matter the most to you? 

What’s unique about you? 

What do you alone truly have to offer? 

Written in a highly personable and conversational fashion, The Last Lecture is part autobiography, part life lesson, and all heart. Through a quick tour of his life and career, Randy demonstrates how one should live while being candid about his impending death.

Despite his condition, Randy’s writing is light-hearted and upbeat. One can’t tell from the prose that its the work of a dying man as its often peppered with deadpan and occasionally self deprecating humour. 

Perhaps the hardest part of the book to read are the sections where Randy writes about his family. One can feel how painful it must be for him to plan so many things ahead – writing little notes to his kids, making videos, bringing his family on various activities etc – while in the throes of death.

It is certainly admirable that Randy manages to rise above his circumstances and to continue to be a teacher even unto his death. As the author himself has shared, the book isn’t about dying but about living. I do know for sure that it has provided me with lots of food for thought about what I should do with my own life.

What readers take away from The Last Lecture is in this same vein. The book isn’t about one man’s struggle against cancer, or the outcome of his treatment (Pausch died on July 25, 2008). It’s not an overcoming-all-odds story. It’s about making the most out of what you have, and enjoying every minute of the adventure, regardless of how it turns out in the end.

RATING -5/5 

A must read.

Book Review #101 : Milk and Honey

Book - Milk and Honey
Author - Rupi Kaur
Genre - Poetry
Publisher - Andrews McMeel Publishing
Hit the shelves on - November 4, 2014
Pages - 204

This heartfelt collection of poems hit the shelves November of 2014. I saw milk and honey in the local bookwalah shop and decided to embrace my poetic side and purchase it. Needless to say, I was baffled with what I found folded into the pages. I was expecting an inspirational slightly tacky read much like how I viewed poetry prior to this. What I found was vulnerability, startling bluntness, and a pure and raw story laced into the pages of Rupi Kaur's poetry.

Kaur breaks her book into four parts; the hurting, the loving, the breaking and the healing. The poems open in a bit of a dark aura. The hurting depicts the author’s experiences with sexual assault and the struggles of overcoming family issues. This section is a bit chilling.

The next section, the loving, is a more uplifting read. The poems are sweet and idealistic. These are the ones that couples want to read to remind themselves of why they are still together.

The breaking returned us to a darker place in Kaur’s life. Any girl that has ever endured a break up after a long term relationship could find a relatable poem in this section. While these poems were sad, they were also very realistic and relatable.

The last section of milk and honey accomplished exactly what I think the author was aiming for. These poems empowered women to embrace themselves and to value who they are regardless of the turmoil they have endured. I would recommend this section to anyone going through a break up or just yearning for some comfort.

Overall, I really enjoyed this compilation of poems and would totally recommend to anyone who is looking to heal from a bad experience in life or breakup.

Btw - Upon publication, ‘milk and honey’ sold over 1.5 million copies, defying expectations of modern poetry’s popularity. In an age favouring easily digested thriller novels and celebrity biographies far above verse, this collection of poetry is certainly the exception to the rule. Perhaps this is due to Kaur undercutting the impersonality of a modernist aesthetic with accessible, simplistic language. Kaur does not subscribe to the belief that poetry must be difficult to be meaningful, championing a direct and inclusive register that unites her personal experiences with the reader. Combining a first person perspective with the repeated second person pronoun ‘you’, Kaur further bridges the gap between her poetry and her audience. She forges a link that causes the reader to imagine themselves not only as author, but as muse. Pointing beyond the page at ‘you’, Kaur rejects the division of the reader from the writer, assimilating her own experiences, memories, and subjects with her audience.

VERDICT - ‘milk and honey’, is a ‘modern classic’, worthy to be read out loud, written in texts to loved ones, and learnt by heart. The reminder to appreciate yourself and to embrace emotion is timeless.

The book teaches you that life is filled with terrible and heartbreaking moments but within those moments you can find great things. Great things that you might have missed if you were not looking. There is so much meaning and emotion behind every word, and it is even relatable. Several of the poems deal with situations that many face today.

RATING – 5/5

Book Review #100 : The Perils of Being Moderately Famous

Title: The Perils of Being Moderately Famous

Author: Soha Ali Khan

Publishing house: Penguin Random House India

Pages: 207

Price: Rs 299 

In the book’s first chapter, ‘Big Shoes, Small Feet’, Soha (meaning star in Arabic) speaks of people sometimes knowing her as ninth Nawab of Pataudi and brilliant cricketer Mansur Ali Khan Pataudi and versatile actress Sharmila Tagore’s daughter or Saif’s sister. 

The book, containing 9 chapters, begins by saying that if you bought/borrowed/shoplifted this book in the hopes of finding out the secret behind Kareena’s glowing complexion or what Bhai really meant when he talked about nepotism and eugenics, then unfortunately this is not the book for you. Here she mentions, to her credit, that she is content to bask in reflected glory while seeking out her unique destiny. Her self-deprecatory humorous streak shines through in a comparison of her paternal grandmother’s rigid daily routine as compared with that of her own on a non-working day. 

Writing about her father, she mentions how if he went shopping in London for a pair of socks, he would buy just that, without falling prey to consumerist temptations. After a car accident, he said, “I lost sight in one eye but I didn’t lose sight of my ambition.” Even after he’d retired and was hospitalised, surrounded by tubes, masks, drips, pills, syringes and doctors he refused to make a fuss and was always polite, ever-charming – making every technician feel comfortable, despite his own discomfort. 

In ‘Wakeful City’, in something most people can connect with, she candidly mentions how financial jargon of investment banking can be akin to googlies. She adds that for bankers SLB is Securities Lending and Borrowing and not Sanjay Leela Bhansali, just as PC is P Chidambaram and not Priyanka Chopra. 

About the 2005 floods in Mumbai, she recollects how she was stranded after her car stalled on SV Road and how warm total strangers were in going out of their way to give her directions, offering drinking water and the use of their phones. At one point, when she sat shivering on a stationary BEST bus, two women across the aisle glanced at her and whispered to each other, making her think of getting off the bus. But one woman said, “It has to stop sometime, don’t worry.” Here she candidly admits that they were not judging her, she was judging them. She ended up chatting away amiably with two women for two hours and for those two hours they were comfortable companions of circumstance. This bond with the city, its people, their resilience and compassion made her keen as per her own words, to do Tum Mile, the 2009 love story set against this very deluge. 

A disturbing recent phenomena she flags attention to, is of how people misuse social media to revel in hate and troll people they have never met and know nothing about. In this context, she cites two examples of the time she was targeted on Twitter for having expressed regret over former RBI Governor Raghuram Rajan announcing his exit in 2016 and then on another occasion when she had worn a sari. 

About relationships, she opines that many seem to survive only on the surface, with an emphasis on having fun and living in the moment. It is too tedious to share our deepest feelings, too hard to commit to being there when things get too tough, too demanding to learn from our mistakes… so much so that people have stopped really knowing each other or impacting each other’s lives. It is more of an existence and less of a life, a life more empty than full. And love is not the absence of irritation, conflict or disappointment. It is hard work and there is always room for improvement. 

This breezy read with reader-friendly text font sizes is based on her personal experiences and has warmth, candidness, humour, offers insights and features never-seen-before images of her family, childhood and her daughter Inaaya. It is hoped this book will help clear up people’s misconceptions about her and add to her fans in the days to come. 

Only Soha Ali Khan should write a memoir. Because what other woman, even on the peripheries of contemporary Bollywood, would get away with writing that her husband frequently "does something that makes me want to get up and punch him in the face." This follows a sentence where she is half-admiring, half-mocking husband Kunal Khemu’s arms which are so sinewy that she can see his muscles flex when he types something into his phone. 

Most chapters in this book have the easy quality of early 2000s personal blogs. And if ever Khan had a noble mission in writing this memoir, it is frequently sidelined by her desire to make a joke. Frequently the jokes are about herself. Like discovering as a full-fledged adult but half-baked Bengali that the Kolkata journalist who referred to her mother as Sharmila Thakur was not wrong; she was just not using the anglicised version, Tagore. 

Perhaps it’s because Khan is not selling anything right now that the book has this bright, genial and extremely enjoyable quality. 

Soha has written crisply about her life so far. Knowingly or unknowingly, she has made sure that the readers do not get bored of her anywhere in the book. This kind of regulation comes in writing only when people are comfortable in their shoes. 

I am in awe of Soha’s writing skills. I don’t know if she can ‘flirt’ with the camera or not, but I do think that Soha Ali Khan can trifle with words. In about 200 pages, she has written on genres like travel, cricket, cinema and romance giving a glimpse of what all she is capable. Though she might not be very popular, undoubtedly she has lived a life full of stories and adventures. 

I really wish though that the cover of the book was more appealing. The land we live in does judge a book by its cover and it’s time that Indian publishers take notice of this. 

It is, a well-written book as well. It doesn’t bore you with unnecessary anecdotes, everything has a purpose. Soha talks about her grandparents, parents, brother, husband and her new bundle of joy with utmost candidness. With an extremely fluidic writing style, which is simple enough to understand but doesn’t score low on finesse. 

I would recommend this book to all those readers and non-readers too who just want to read and spend some time in reading book written with sheer honesty. It is enjoyable. 

RATING – 4.8/5