The Best Thing about You Is You! by Anupam Kher

Author:Anupam Kher
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Hay House
Published: 2011-11-30T16:00:00+00:00

25

Old Wisdom from New-Age Gurus

… in all times of uncertainty throughout history,

we all seek the same old wisdom but from new-age gurus.

That is why we need ‘The Change Within’ and

the life-coaching books in the stores.

A FEW WEEKS BACK, ON ENTERING A BOOKSHOP, I WAS STRUCK BY an ever-rising trend I have found in all bookshops these days. There are not just shelves, but entire sections, devoted to books chalking out programmes to deal with the problems of life. These sections are commonly known as Mind, Body, Spirit.

Decades ago when I was a student, there were self-help books like Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, Thomas A. Harris’ I’m OK, You’re OK, and E. F. Schumacher’s Small Is Beautiful. Then came books on subjects such as yoga and meditation, which were normally the choice of those in their fifties. A decade or so ago, spiritualism became the new fashionable norm and authors like Louise Hay, Deepak Chopra, Wayne Dyer and Brian Weiss became the rage. Then we all gorged on the Chicken Soup series. Now, there is a younger audience out there and there are the new icons, in authors like Paulo Coelho, Robin Sharma, Jim Stovall, Rhonda Byrne and numerous others.

Why are we seeing such a surge of interest in self-help books in our country at a time when all our economic indices are at historic highs and India is the second-fastest growing economy in the world?

The answer lies therein — that we as humans are unable to cope with such growth.

Underlying such a blistering pace of growth is the bewildering array of choices before us in every product field, due to which our lives have become complex.

We have forgotten that until just about 20 years back, we had a choice of two cars. Today, we can choose from almost 400 car models with prices ranging from Rs 1.4 lakh for the Nano to Rs 4.5 crore for a Rolls Royce coupé. From just one reputed cosmetic brand, we today have access to over fifty brands at the last count. The product lines have exploded.

Similarly, in education, where we once aspired to be in the IITs (Indian Institutes of Technology) and IIMs (Indian Institutes of Management), the current generation has the world to choose from and thinks nothing of planning for a career in MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) or at the Kellogg School of Management, both in the USA.

Life has become even more complicated when it comes to financial decisions. A decade ago, we just had the Life Insurance Corporation with a clutch of policies. Today we have many companies with over a hundred complicated insurance schemes. And there are even more complex investment choices in place of fixed deposits, mutual funds, debt instruments, derivatives, commodity options and so on.

My belief may be slightly controversial, but to look at it my way, every major economy had time to ingest the growth process. Not India. The US and Europe have had television since the 1950s and have seen it grow to colour to cable to satellite in the 60 years since.

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