2021 & Beyond - Good Health

Good Health is my first priority for 2021 and beyond.

I will start with physical health. Over the last several years, I understood that certain aspects of health were not under my control. 2021 made me realize that fully. So, I just told myself that “ to become and staying happy”, I just need to set aside the things that were not under my control. After this became a lifestyle mantra, other things started to follow easily.

My plan for good physical health started with good eating, sleeping and physical activity. 

Good diet was not much of a problem, given that I could eat or should not eat was governed by my doctor. Therefore the focus turned on to eating on time or rather not eating at untimely hours. Starting November, I slowly started to get this into some bit of control. I started following some of the things that I was told earlier by either my Pranic healer or by a nutritionist. My Pranic healer used to say that its very bad to drink coffee or tea first thing in the morning, as both these (especially coffee) are highly acidic. He advised me to drink a glass of warm or chilled milk first thing in the morning and drink my coffee after 45-60 minutes. I started this on a daily basis. Also, due to realignment of my medications, was forced to have breakfast around 8 am. While I have not seen much of a benefit in the short time, I think this will definitely lead to an improvement over a period of time.  

The next focus was on physical activity. I used to run a fair bit before May (including during lockdown, when I used to run inside my house or my apartment complex), but then a 2-month flare up of my ulcerative colitis put a stop to this. So had to restart my running. After about month being locked up due to my corona illness, when i first started to run, I could not do my usual distance or pace. I attributed this to a combination of my lack of activities for over 3 months and post COVID issues. Therefore, I started walking again. At the same time, I started some of the yoga stretches I used to do a few years ago to improve my flexibility as well as strengthen my lower back. This became a routine for about 4-5 weeks. Then out of the blue, Netflix said you can watch stuff for free for a weekend. I downloaded so much stuff that I am still watching for 3 weeks, that my walking / yoga sessions have almost literally stopped. The last 2 weeks made me realize that getting into discipline is very hard. You cannot have distractions. So, starting the whole routine again this week. The plan now is to start regular morning and evening walks, morning yoga and may be weekend cycling. Let’s see how this goes. I will update this routine again at the end of January.

The third leg of my 3-legged stool called good physical health is good sleep. A lot of us, including myself in my earlier days give the least importance to sleep - both the duration and the quality. While I used to get  my quota of sleep, I always felt that I could do better on the quality of sleep. My doctor kept telling me for last 5 years to sleep early and wake up early. We all learnt in this in primary school - “Early bed, early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise”. Somehow, our later education made us “wise enough” to both forget this proverb and discard it as unnecessary. Add to this our technology advancement. A couple of decades ago, not many in India new about baseball, basketball or American football. In the last twenty years, with friends and relatives in the US, and technology bringing these sports to our living rooms (and to our handheld devices, in the recent past months), our sleep patterns has been disturbed by “live sports”. I used to watch sports, movies etc sometimes beyond midnight. To correct this, I told myself that I will get to bed early. But because I was used to sleeping late, just by getting to bed early did not make me sleep early. I turned the way around - I started getting up by 5 am. After a few days, my body became tired and I had to sleep by 9:30 pm. This became a routine, and for last 4 weeks or so, i am sticking to a 9:30 pm bed time and 5 am wake up alarm. While I have not felt any benefits of this now, this helped me in my next step to happiness - good mental health. More on that tomorrow.

 

2021 and Beyond ...

As I said yesterday, the last 6 weeks has made me think of what next, including coming up with a plan for 2021 and more importantly, for the rest of my life..

I always like to put pen to paper when i think. As I started writing, the first thing i wrote was what i wanted in life / out of life - the answer was a single, simple word, “happiness”. This seemed to simplistic and kind of unrealistic. The next question that came up was “what is happiness”. This answer somehow was too difficult and I am yet to get it. I therefore focused my thoughts on “what i need to do to achieve happiness”. This question, seemed a lot more easier one to answer, but i found that there was no single or simple answer. A few more days, hacking my brain, a bit of reading some of our scriptures, a book about an elite athlete and a coupe of courses gave me some pointers.

This is what I found. To be happy, I need to

1. Be in good health - physically and mentally
2. Look back in the past, think of good times and try to repeat or do similar activities
3. Be useful, or helpful to everyone who asked for my help.

After some more time of thinking, I felt everything that I could think of, could be put into one of these three things.

Before I elaborate on the above, I will take a step back and explain my philosophy of life. For more than 15 years, I have always felt that everything in our life can be put into 2 buckets: Needs and Wants. The more we confine ourselves to our needs and minimize our wants, we can lead a happy and a fulfilling life. Now, with this is the background, I started to detail out a plan for 2021 and rest of my life.

1. Be in good health:

For over 15 years, i have suffered severe back pain on and off due to disc degeneration. I have visited multiple doctors, gone through a whole lot of treatment and therapy, starting from physiotherapy sessions to Ayurvedic treatments to yoga. At a point 12 years ago, a doctor said I have to wear an orthopedic belt to support my back for the rest of my life and have to be extremely careful even when doing small things like getting up and down a footpath on the road. It took me several years to get over that (after I changed the doctor and the mode of treatment), when one fine day in 2015 I ran my first 10 km race.

Over the last 5 years, my ulcerative colitis, an autoimmune disorder (which is supposed to be part of my life) has put in a lot of restrictions on what i can do and cannot. These have taught me the importance of good physical health. I realized that if I need to have happiness, I should be healthy. While somethings cannot be changed, others are under our control. This line of thinking made me realize this most important truth of my life: “try to control the controllables, and leave to God the uncontrollables”. This was also the first step to my next part of the plan - good mental health. A strong mind leads to a strong body. We have all read this, or been told or taught this. But more often than not, we neglect this. I now decided to put a plan for building my mental health as well.

2. Repeat past good things

As I progressed further, I thought of what made me happy in the past. I identified several things that made me happy including temple visits, travel, books, unplanned trips etc. So, the key was to repeat these things in the future to get happiness. As they say, invest in experiences instead of things, because experiences makes us happy over a longer period than things. 

Having identified the areas, I started my plan. More importantly, I decided i would do things that would change my life one step at a time. Wait until tomorrow to read my plan and the runway, and if the early successes and failures.

2020 - The Googly Year

I recently read a tweet - “Hindsight is 2020 was a probably said by a time traveler from the future”. 😁 How true. No one saw such a year coming, including all the astrologers who came on TV on 1st Jan 2020 and predicted a wonderful 2020.

The year had turned the lives of a lot of people beyond recognition - people lost their lives, lost their loved ones, lost jobs, had to walk hundreds of kilometers without food and water back to their homes and many more. These were, as usual, the people who were less fortunate.

On the personal front, I was better off, with just some minor inconveniences. I belong to the more fortunate group of people, having never bothered about a roof over my head, or walls to protect me from natures vagaries, always comfortable to know that my next hot meal will be served when due and nicely clothed. So, while this year, did not affect me much, I had my own ups and downs. Some very positive happenings, time periods to pretty bad periods. 

The first two months, like for most of us, were very good. I was into my fitness routine, clocking 20 km of running every week, reading a fair bit, and in general trying to enjoy lie. A trip to Puri in February was a highlight for this year. I had booked a trip about year ago, and had to cancel it then. May be, Lord Jaganath did not want me to come and see Him then. While this time, I was blessed to spend 5 days in Puri, with close to 10 hours every day inside the temple complex, either at the Darshan, listening to the Bhajans or watching the flag changing ceremony. A few more days at Bhubaneswar and Konark rounded a beautiful trip. This trip made me understand myself a bit more. One, I could travel without knowing the local language or Hindi. Two, I could survive on rice and curd and idly for 10 days and still enjoy my travel. It also threw a couple of surprises - the local bus travel without understanding anything but just buying a ticket to the destination, trying hard to get curd rice which did not contain onion, chillies or mustard seasoning.

Come March, while people were yet to start washing their hands and maintaining social distance, I had a trailer about 10 days before lock down. I contracted the famed “madras eye” or conjunctivitis of the eye, and for a week was washing my hands at least 20 times, and staying away from family. When the lock down was announced and the washing and distancing was mandated, i felt it was more an extension of my previous 10 days. While the early days of lockdown didn’t affect me much, unfortunately, my ulcerative colitis found a good time for flare up. Between mid-may and end-June, things were pretty horrible - my health was not so good, unfortunately none of my doctors were available, therefore no medicinal assistance to treat me. I was just running blind. This was the time, my belief in “karma” strengthened and I just took things one day at a time. Post July, with weekly consultations health improved and by end July I was almost my usual self, the only downside was losing a few kilos of weight.

The year had a couple of more health scares, including testing positive for corona, and forced into isolation for 17 days, plus more medication. As they say, “this too shall pass”, was true. The isolation was a blessing in disguise. I saw many movies that were in pipeline. It also gave me time to think on what next. As the year progressed, a voluntary decision to get off network - no facebook, 2 hours of internet time, no phone calls and many more restrictions helped me a lot. I thought a lot on the past, present and future. Introspection and Reflection makes a person to improve self. I used this period to plan for future as well as to write a a fair number of personal “thank you” notes to people who made an impact on my life. 

Finally, as the new year begins, what did I learn from 2020:

1. Believe in “this too shall pass”, whenever you face difficult situations
2. Be grateful for all the good things that you have in life
3. Once in a while, try to get out of “comfort zone”, as someone sad ‘ Life begins at the end of your comfort zone’
4. Help others, especially people who are less fortunate than you.

The last 6 week also helped me to prepare a plan for myself. More on that later.

Wishing all readers a happy, prosperous, safe and healthy new year.

Reading: Is a window to an exciting world

Reading, according to me is a window to a new and an exciting world. During my school and college days, and even early part of my corporate life, I read more for pleasure, than to gain something useful. One incident flipped this thinking, in my fledgling IT career. By fate, I became an ERP consultant. I was neither aware of what a consultant should do, nor have any prior experience outside of IT world. This incident happened almost 2 years into my career. We had a product demonstration to the client. I was all dressed up, including a tie, standing in front of the client in a large conference room, talking about the product features.

An hour into the presentation, as I was explaining a key feature, and saying why it was important, I was stopped. The client CFO then started explaining that his industry didn’t work that way and he needed the feature to be customized. I was like a “deer caught in the headlights “. I did not know how his industry worked. I was not experienced enough to talk about customizing the product. Thankfully, a senior person pitched in stated, that we can discuss this in detail once we start the project. 

During the break, another person from the client team casually stated that I need some industry experience. That was a turning point for me. I knew that I cannot go out of IT and gain industry experience. Also, there is no end to it. Tomorrow another person from another industry would comment that I did not know their industry. I started to think what could be the way out. The solution was “ to read “. I started reading books about various industry. The first few books I read were about basics of finances - profit and loss, balance sheet, cash flows etc. During the same time, I got interested in investing in the stock market. This incentivized me to read more. How to read and understand a company’s finances, understand their business and therefore make my investment decisions. I started to read about the companies, their business to be comfortable to invest in the stock. Sometimes, I would talk to people in that industry to gain a better understanding. 

Over the next 15 years in my career, I read a lot of books. On an average about 20 books a year.. This did not include the books I read for pleasure - the fiction, comics, etc. These books were business books, biographies or autobiographies of successful business leaders. I became a “ Forrest Gump” for reading. 

As I matured, I started to read books about failed businesses or leaders. Every book I read, every new and important piece of information was stored in memory. Some of them I tried to put into practice. Others were stored for a rainy day. Over a period of time, this habit broadened to reading a wide variety of things and storing for future use. Every time I started a new project in a new domain, I read the fundamentals of the how the industry worked. I started reading and learning about the nuances of that particular industry. Over a period of time, this helped me to gain respect from most of the clients that I worked with and sometimes even from my peers.

An interesting incident to finish this post. During a conversation for planning an offsite event, our leadership team was discussing on the travel, how we could not get train tickets, and how travel by road was difficult, I suggested that there is an option to hire an entire coach and attach it to the train, but it needed advance permissions from railway authorities. People did not believe it initially, but found that there was a provision. My reading helped that day.

Keep reading...

I will continue to write about reading, some of the books that influenced me personally, that helped me at work, etc, in the coming days.

Reading: a peep into a new world for me

A very long time ago, about 4 decades, may be a bit more, I got hold of my first book. A bit worn down copy of  Amar Chitra Katha (ACK). Worn down, because every other cousin and my brother had read it at least twice, before handing it to me, the youngest at about 5-6 years old. I was fascinated by the pictures more, than by the story. A few months later, the eagerly awaited first issue of aTinkle came home. Over the next few years, ACK and Tinkle were mainstays, with the likes chandamama, champak getting added to this list. Slowly, Tintin and Snoopy came into my world. As I grew older, Enid Blyton fillled my summers, vacations and weekends. Then Hardy Boys.

During my pre-teens and early teenage years, books were a form of entertainment. Sometimes, they were an escape into a fantasy land. A time came when sports occupied a major portion of outside school hour. Despite that, books continued to have a special place. 

I was fortunate, as some say, to be born in a family of people who valued reading. My paternal grandfather was a writer, and my maternal grandfather used to read 2 newspapers including a business paper every day even in his late 70s. But the biggest driver was my father. He was a voracious reader, and when I was in high school, my elder brother was running at a pretty fast pace along with my father. May be it was in the genes, may be the environment was conducive or may be it was peer pressure, or plain luck / fate, I got into a regular habit of reading. 

Over the years, what started with reading fiction, slowly expanded into non-fiction. It wasn’t until after I finished my college, my scope expanded into serious reading our epics. Seveal events led me to discover our epics and scriptures - mainly the Ramayanam, the Mahabharatham, and the Bhagavad Gita. This phase  in my life, made me realize a lot of things. It gave some meaning to what I thought was life then. It pointed me in a direction which I felt was the right one. 

As I got into corporate world, the business books entered my reading area. I used to read a lot of business books trying to understand and make sense of understanding business, the various domains, some great leaders and companies.

My 20s were probably the best time in life with my books. This was the time that I realized that Books were the window to the world. More importantly, to choose the right set of books, to get a proper understanding of the world. As they say, travel gives you the best experience in life. Reading gives you the next best, without the same effort, time or cost. Thankfully, my choice of books were good, and therefore my journey was fruitful. My biggest learning by the time I reached my 30s was this - to read, daily. Without fail. Because, reading gives you the knowledge of things that you may not experience in life. 

Remember, Ignorance is bliss, but knowledge is power. 

More on reading in the following posts including how reading changed my life, how it helped me get ahead of competition in my corporate world, and may be a list of books that made a big impact on me.

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Birthdays: A time to take stock

During my college years, every festival and my birthday every year was a big event for me. While Deepavali and Pongal were big celebrations, my birthdays were special. I used to receive close to 50 birthday cards every year, from family and friends (Yes, there was this concept of giving a card).

As years progressed, life started to change. During my initial career, birthdays were still big. Colleagues used to celebrate it at office with a cake cutting, a dinner party that day or lunch during the weekend was mandatory. The festivals continued to be a big favourite, as I would travel back home for the celebrations. 

The first casualty was the birthday. As I grew older, stopped celebrating them. Then the email / egreeting picked up causing the end of the “ birthday card” culture. The next was the festivals. By early 30s, I stopped celebrating festivals and birthdays. I felt these were not worth celebrating. 

A few years later. These occasions became “just another day”. I even stopped buying / wearing new dresses, a mandatory event, for festivals. I even stopped exchanging the mechanical celebratory messages. Only, the special meal at home would continue. 

After all these years, I started to think that there might be a purpose to the birthday. Every new year, we all make new resolutions - become fit, / healthy, lose weight, read more, learn something new, so on and so forth. At the start of every financial year, we start planning for our tax savings, investments etc. 

So, may be, birthdays are a good day, to take stock. A stock taking day or event - for our karma. When I mean karma, I don’t mean the so called “punyam” or “paavam” as prescribed in our religious texts but of our good deeds and misgivings as per our conscience. Every birthday, can be a time for reflection of what good things that we did in the last year. What can we do better? Where did we slip, and can we correct it this year? Can we become a better person, understand better the purpose we are here and take a step towards realizing that? The purpose can be to  realize God or Godliness in yourself. It can be to realize how you can be a benefit to the society at large, which has helped you or to find personal happiness in what you do. It depends on whether you are a theist or an atheist or agnostic. 

So, over the last several years, i have been using this period, my birthday time, to take stock of my karma. I make it a point to start my birthday every year by doing something good. It can be a monetary donation to someone who needs it or till a few years ago, i used to donate blood on my birthday, etc. Something which starts me on the right note. 

So, do your stock taking on your birthdays. Re-focus on your life. 

Life is beautiful. 

Travel, to Experience Life

In an earlier post, I talked a bit about why you should travel. Let me go into details of the why, including sharing some of my travel experiences.

Travel is a way to Experience Life - Life beyond our normal routine, life beyond your homes, beyond the usual people you meet. Initially, I thought why do i need this experience; I don’t need it. But as I grew older I realized travel makes you wiser. Gives you the experience to handle life better.

My initial travel were all related to going to temples in various parts of Tamil Nadu. This was my main interest those days. I visited over 80 temples across various parts of the state. Sometimes, packing over a dozen temples in a weekend. My initial travel were all dictated by my work schedule. My mother, who used to accompany me, as she was interested in visiting temples, was the guinea ping in all these experiments. We had travelled by trains, buses, local taxis and autos, sometimes hoping from one temple to another or one town to another.

Some of our experiences:

During a 2-day trip to temples around kumbakonam, I noted the return bus departure time wrongly. My mother and I left the hotel and walked towards the bus stand. I told her we had 30 minutes and can walk the 10 minute distance. On the way, she wanted to pick up some magazines to read in the bus. We took a short detour, and as we were picking the magazines, the travels guy called me and said the bus was ready to depart. I begged him to wait for 10 minutes, paid for the magazines and with 2 bags and mom, rushed towards the bus stand. After 5 minutes, I called the agent and asked for the status. He said the bus had left. We were walking and suddenly I found a bus with destination chennai from the same private operator. I stopped the bus and after giving my name to the conductor asked him it was the same bus that we missed. After getting an earful from him, we got onto the bus. He came again after 10 minutes and told me “ Sir, you should be more careful traveling with an elderly person, so that you don’t rush them”.

Most of the temples that we went in that phase were usually off the usual path. Some were in small towns, others off-beat. During those 2 years, inevitably, every temple we visited around breakfast or lunch time, we were always provided with something to eat by the priest. I used to tell my mother that this was really something divine. We got good food, without fail, and more importantly, without our asking. This only strengthened My faith.

Such experiences make you better. In the first instance, after that, i always double checked my departure times. Always. In the second, reiterated by beliefs. Every similar experience taught me something.

Travel brings in such experiences to you. It will enrich your life. Go on. Pack our bags. Open your minds.