be inspired

Focus groups, colleague rants, song lyrics on my mp3 player, workshops, meetings, empty can of diet coke in the trash, all doors opening outside, or the pack of tissues in your top drawer – no matter what you are doing, where you are, who is staring at you and no matter what you are feeling - just be inspired, always. It is this spark that keeps the creator inside all of us fired up!
Sometimes I feel that the world around me has so much to offer, show, share, tell that I do not have hands, eyes or grasp to soak it all up..
The last 60 days of being in Beijing have been quite patterned. Other than the fact that I am in a new place – nothing is new. Wake up; dress up, hail a cab, ‘ni hao’ to the cabbie, xie xie to the security guard at office for opening the door, elevator to 9th floor, good morning to colleagues, work, work, workshops, researches, meetings, presentations, work more...raving the hits and ranting the misses everyday, shut down, wrap up, swipe the access card head home, swipe into home again, freshen up, eat (and miss Indian food), restart, connect with parents and all other mails that could not be read and written at work…but with all this serious monotony around why do I still feel inspired? How do I still have fresh insights and ideas waiting to be deployed?
I am sure all this is not because of the mental disequilibrium caused by the strange smell that stays with you hours after you have stepped away from the fresh food section of all hypermarkets in this city!
I believe it is more to do with what is cooking between my ears than what is happening around me though I would never discount the importance of the latter.
The world around me is just the firewood but sadly or otherwise the firewood does not always come with a spark.

Here is what I am beginning to understand - no matter where one is no matter what one is doing, the single most important thing is to be always inspired, be bullish, be natural, connect with the air you are breathing, listen intently – even if you do not understand the language – soak up everything that comes your way and keep thinking (questioning) and feeling all of it that you see, hear, touch, smell, taste, do, imagine and everything else, believe me sparks will fly. It is simply amazing there is so much one can learn all the time even or especially when one is not actively trying to learn something.
Also, the best things we know and feel are never documented – my favourite one on this that the real wisdom is the operating system of our behaviour and most of the time it is not documented. I suppose it is the subconscious or perhaps something that we never bother to think about. But this is it – this is the most critical link between our understanding of self and the world around us. It is not fixed but that should not stop us from capturing it. If we try and keep documenting it every time we get an opportunity – we might end up discovering a gold mine in our own backyard. Needles to say this is not the only goldmine known to mankind but none the less it seems the most accessible one.
Here’s perhaps one way of doing it – just replay your daily movie. I mean just play the whole day in front of your eyes and you'll see sparks flying.
There's something more on this that can be said here but I guess this has already become too big for a bite, so perhaps more on this in the days to some i.e. if it stays as exciting as it is now.
I sincerely hope I have been able to express myself accurately and wish that you can also experience what I am experiencing– because it is truly amazing and very-very satisfying!

Self-help Tsunami

When I got to know that a westerner was surprised to see the titles in an Indian bookstore I was curious. He was surprised by store’s extensive focus on business and non-fiction books. This is in sharp contrast to what a typical western bookstore is selling.
If Crossword is a good sample then I must confess that his observation was precise. The Indian book reader seems to be on a self-help & non-fiction spree.
A quick look at the sections and the titles being promoted reveals that we are reading a whole lot of business books. Be it finance, marketing, HR or operations; books on HOW TO sell, crack that job interview, grow faster, get that corner office, SPEAK ENGLISH and a lot more, the list is endless.

While most of the ‘non-textbooks’ have traditionally been bought for leisure reading, we have a new crop of readers who started reading books (other than text books) much later in life, They have not been brought up on the Famous Five, Hardy Boys, Enid Blyton etc as kids and have not read Ayn Rand, Sydney Sheldon etc. as youth or young adults. They started much later (late 20s or early 30s) and their decision to read books was a result of realization that if they have to get ahead in their profession/occupation – they need to know more than what their qualification (Engineer or CA or anything else) taught them. Thus began the journey of adopting a new habit – reading books that help.
You’d find these 20/30 something in suburban trains/buses, immersed in Shiv Khera’s You can win or Covey’s 7 habits or The 8th habit, while clutching the overhead handles as the laptop bag hangs from their shoulder over the crumpled blue shirt. I also see them in the long and winding boarding queues at airport terminals.
These are, as some consumer behaviour books and demo/psychographic surveys call, ‘the aspirers’.

Equally interesting is the attitude of these aspirers towards the reading habits of their children. Instead of focusing only on the textbooks (like they once themselves did) these parents want their children to read fiction. Why? Because they believe that a lot of English early in life, be it in the form of reading, talking, at school, or with a teacher, or interaction with a more well-traveled and proficient uncle/aunt has therapeutic properties. It prepares you for the world outside the classroom and the world beyond Indian shores.

I do not know why but I can’t help thinking about China’s one child policy in this context. Out there it was a Govt. regulation not have more than one child, in India, it seems, parents have self-imposed the ‘Must Learn English Language’ policy on their kids.

In this future full of aspirer households, I am curious about the future of light/leisure reading & regional and the National languages. We just might be moving to a non-Hindi urban India in another 10-15 years where the preferred mode of interpersonal communication becomes English and reading, among aspirers, becomes predominantly non-fiction.
For every trend there could easily be a niche counter trend and I won’t be surprised to see mushrooming of training institutes that promise to groom children or grandchildren of these aspirers in the ‘innocence and originality of our mother tongue’ be it Hindi or our native language.

Also, these hyper-ambitious adults might look at different leisure activities (viz. going out, doing something) in their free time, instead of staying home & reading fiction.

Again there could be a niche counter trend to this that could, well, be about staying home or going to a reading lounge (not library),, where you meet like minded people, discuss and debate ideas, concepts from what you are reading or what you are thinking..
Hyper-speculative I’d say but very likely.