As a seven-year-old, when Deepak Ramola visited Delhi’s amusement park Appu Ghar, he was elated, and a series of questions crossed his mind.
“Wouldn’t it be amazing if this was my school? Why can’t we be this carefree all the time? Why do we have to be so formal in life?”— all questions leading him to his life’s journey.
Today Ramola, 28, who is a TED Talk speaker and lyricist, focusses on asking the right questions via his new book, 50 Toughest Questions of Life. Questions like, ‘Are you grateful to your pain that it chose you over everyone else?’, ‘How can someone make you feel more loved?’, ‘What do you not have that you really, really want?’ among others, are included in the book.
“So much of our life has been employed with this idea that answers are the main juice of life. But over the years, I have learnt that everyone has answers, one needs to ask the right questions, For example, if you are going through a tough time and the question you have posed is, ‘why is this happening to me?’, it is going to make you feel pitiful and agitated, but if you change this question to ‘what it is trying to teach me?’ Suddenly you are into a more empowered stage with the same situation. Unfortunately, I didn’t come across enough books trying to bring forward this approach.” he admits.
The questions in the book are shaped by his experiences in running the initiative, Project Fuel, which collects life lessons from people all over the world and turns them into interactive activities to pass on the learnings.
He says, “I am collecting life lessons from a diverse set of people from the age of 14. I have been asking my school bus driver, teachers, guests at home, about what has life taught you? And further noting those down. Now, whenever I face certain problems, I go to the knowledge I have acquired. I have learnt both from the young and old. A lot of questions are from the experiences I had through Project Fuel.”
Ramola’s teaching methodology has been recognised among the world’s top 100 innovations in education by the Finland-based organisation HundrED, and has also been adopted by the education board of Antwerp in Belgium. His journey into gaining a sense of wisdom about the world was inspired by his mother who was pulled out of school by her family at the age of five.
He says, “Despite not receiving formal education, my mother is a very intelligent and articulate person who says life experiences have been her lessons. These lessons are not available on the Internet, and everyone has something or other to offer. So, I just interviewed a lot of people.”
The gold medalist in journalism says that he hasn’t faced resistance from people opening up to him, but they did find it difficult to speak up in a different way.
“Nowadays, people are overwhelmed by the pressure of sounding profound. This has led them to retire in some sort of a cocoon,” says Ramola, who recently won the prestigious Dwarka Prasad Aggarwal Young Writer Award 2020 for his poetry collection,
Itna Toh Main Samajh Gaya Hoon.
Talking about his disengagement route from taking in mass emotions and helping people, Ramola gives full credit to afternoon naps.
“Those are the utter privileges.”