Happiness Purpose – Edward De Bono

Being a reader with not many strong preferences towards genres, the closest genre I come to favour is self-help. I know…its sad. More so because many of the books in this category are junk, rather than the futility of the pursuit itself. After all nothing is more worthy than an effort put towards a better life, a better ‘me’. Anyway, these aforementioned books usually sell because of one concept or sometimes just a catchy phrase which gives you a temporary ‘Aha’ moment. Like the much used ‘imagine you are dead’ or ‘what if you die today’ concept to make you realize what your priorities in life should be. Or the ‘principle-centeredness’ of Covey, the NLP of Antony Robbins. You get the idea…

The credit of course goes to the magic of words – the same things said with different words have different impact on different people. Which is why so many self-help books and therefore Gurus click well enough to become best-sellers. It makes sense to someone somewhere. And this lengthy preamble is just to say I have found one book that makes sense to me.

Happiness Purpose by Edward De Bono claims to be a new religion, a meta-system, that helps you find happiness. He reasons that when your demand-space / life-space is closest to your cope-space / self-space you are likely to be happy. And when you look at it that way, all you need to do to be happy is

a) increase your self-space and / or

b) decrease your life-space

He lists out specific ways to do both which makes happiness more attainable. It does seem too simple to be true and sometimes it also seems to be fundamentally wrong to take such a thinking-based approach to being happy, considering its unpredictability and elusiveness. But all said and done this is the sanest thing I have ever heard about happiness, especially since I tend to agree with the many dimensions of happiness explained by De Bono.

Another concept that stayed with me from the book is that of a proto-truth, i.e., a truth we accept for the time being till a better truth is found. A lot of our conflicts are around what is true and what we expect to be true forever. So this tolerance of ‘truth-for-now’ which is not too feeble but not very rigid either, makes many things easier to deal with.

The book is highly structured – the chapters and sub-topics very clearly laid out so that there is no rambling anywhere. But hello, this is De Bono! What else does one expect? Thankfully he doesn’t call it the 10 secrets of everlasting happiness or 5 things you need to do to achieve inner peace. For that alone I love this book. It cannot be read just once if you seriously want to give it a shot. But it is also not something you can do 1 day at a time. So you need to read it fully once and then go back to specific areas where you think you can work on. All that if you are looking for a way to be happy of course…

This book is of not much use to you if you are one of those happy souls, except may be to understand why you are happy when others are not. Its also not useful to you at times of crisis or if your life tends to be a series of tragedies. That’s in fact one of the dimensions this framework doesn’t address effectively enough – it does not consider the extreme conditions – terrorism, poverty, ailments, loss or sheer bad luck. Perhaps, it is a proto-truth that some questions just don’t have answers. That point aside, this book and the concept deserve a reading if only to get a thinking mind’s approach to happiness. One can almost visualize De Bono sorting out things in his head, one step at a time, to decode happiness as if were a complex mathematical problem. Interesting!

p.s. The Book now comes with a cover image of a man jumping around with an umbrella. The one I read had the image I have used – a girl leisurely blowing bubbles in air – thought this looked more like happiness :-)

yet another year end

Can you believe that I wrote this post a year ago? So many months, so few books, even fewer posts! Time for the window to get active i say! So here is my bit, so that 2010 doesn’t feel left out (wink!)

Just like last year, I have borrowed some books from Suki which has kind of revived my reading ritual. Completed ‘The Last Child’ by John Hart in 2 days (in snatches of course). A book on a young boy’s search for his lost twin sister, it’s written at a pace that makes you restless to know what’s coming next; its also disturbing, as every character has a predominantly dark nature (the only ones that are on the bright side are missing or dead). Every character also threatens to turn darker any time and you are always expecting something terrible to happen. While that makes the book a page turner, its also a disadvantage as no ending can live up to that kind of tension (unless may be its open to the reader to guess / think beyond the last page – like ‘Primal Fear’ for example). Anyway, worth a read though like Arth says in the previous post - once read, I will want my time back to read something else.

I also read Dork by Sidin Vadakut which reaffirms my belief that moving from a blog to a full-fledged book is no easy thing. I kept waiting for the Laugh-out-loud moments which are aplenty in his blog, but it never happened. I read it fully nevertheless and wasn’t bored at all. The style is something like Chetan Bagat meets Salinger; oh, and for once the setting, the characters and situations are what someone like me would have seen experience first-hand (MBA, campus placements, consulting, clients, etc.) – this I would say is the biggest plus for Dork. It is narrated in the form of someone’s diary and it feels just like that – unintentionally entertaining and not written keeping a reader in mind. gosh! feels awkward to review a blogger’s book (unlike established, distant or dead authors) its like reviewing your classmate or something…but i bought his book and reviewed it like any other. so there.

I still want to read Great Bong’s book except I don’t quite relate to Bollywood (nothing against movies of course, I LOVE movies – in languages I understand that is..) or Bong references (no Bengali friends) or cricket techniques (oh these females!) which I expect to find in his writing, naturally. That must make me sound anti-hindi, anti-everything not south Indian, anti-men and their games. Which I hope I am not. Just unfamiliar milieu. But his blog is the only place I like to read political / social topics and he does them so well. Not like you owe it to your existence to read such topics, but spontaneously readable. As if its only natural that one knows the role of Turkey in the middle-east political landscape… See what i mean?

All the other books read in 2010 are in some kind of distant memory and none of them un-put-down-able. I have not finished any of the books I had vowed to do justice to. Instead I have a new set of books I owe a full reading. The Kite Runner is happening at the moment. I have given up on Thomas Friedman (nothing fried the dietician says! i know - poor joke), wild swans (too much history in one book) and harry potter (i really cant handle fantasyland). Made in America, Diary of a young girl and Mein Kampf still have a chance. War and Peace and a few more classics will join the party. I am also desperately looking for some fun books seeing that FUN has become my new life theme. Inspirational will work too. Don’t they write life-changing books any more? I really do WANT to read. Suggestions are welcome. Here is to 2011, hoping it will be far better in book-reading terms and the rest of the terms too! :-)

"Wolf Hall' by Hilary Mantel

It’s not a book I would have picked up on my own. It was a birthday gift and came much recommended and had the Booker prize tag and I’ve had good experiences with Booker prizes before. So why not? Sometimes it helps - the tags. It’s not like I run behind the New York Times Bestseller list but a Booker or a Nobel prize winner kind of guarantees you a certain standard - most of the time.

It’s a story we’ve known for a long time through history books, through movies. With ‘Wolf Hall’ Hilary Mantel attempts to bring alive the characters and details in the tumultuous life of Henry VIII through an unlikely protagonist - Thomas Cromwell. The story in brief - the deadly war between Henry VIII and the catholic church and the rise of a blacksmith’s son Thomas Cromwell in this context. Amidst all the historical references what makes the novel come alive is the depiction of Thomas Cromwell himself. Cromwell is a cruel lawyer, lawmaker and at the same time an understanding man, loving father and a fair master. I found myself supportive and at times even sympathetic of Cromwell in spite of his ensuing cruelties. It’s not uncommon to do that - considering Mantel’s depiction of Cromwell in the first place. While in actual history, Cromwell, in fact, meets the same end as the many others he subjected to - charged with treason and subsequent execution. Well, history also views Thomas Cromwell as the devil incarnate who fuelled the monstrous Henry VIII’s cruel and devastating regime.

What I like about Wolf Hall is not the history lesson it offers. In fact, just the opposite. Mantel chooses to look at the story from the perspective of the characters themselves - their emotions, a guesstimation of what prompted them to do whatever it is they did. She does not offer a lengthy debate on historical or spiritual consequences of the era. She distances herself from taking sides. If you are aware of the history of the period, it makes an interesting read. Especially as you know how it all culminates to the subsequent monarchs. But there are some obvious and as you will know if you look around a bit more, some oft repeated shortcomings to the book.

To start with, I suspect the whole context will be lost on you if you don’t understand medieval English history. That’s just to start with. I’ve long suspected that Booker prize winners are shortlisted based on their quaint sense of grammatical understanding and how complicated they make reading their books. Mantel fulfills the criteria hands down. The pronoun ‘he’ is used in plentiful throughout the book and often without reference to the subject itself. Most of the times it’s safe to assume that every ‘he’ refers to Cromwell, even if he’s not assumed to be in the context. But that takes some reorienting and at times rereading.

In summary, it was an enjoyable read but I’m tempted to ask Mantel to return my 4 weeks back - I could have read something more interesting.