December is a happy month of gifts—I get a whole host of planners and diaries, the odd tie, Christmas cakes, New Year goodies and this and that! This year, I got a different gift altogether. On the second day of December, a ready-to-make ‘Chaat Kit’ landed up at my desk. This was as “desi” as it could get. A big, delightful box with every dry and mildly wet item that goes onto a plate of delicious chaat was here for me to embark on a ‘Do it yourself’ concoction.
As I checked into the delightful crevices of every partition in the box, there were as many as 26 items in it, each diligently labelled. The instruction leaflet told me that I had to get some fresh stuff organised whenever I wanted to make a plate. This included boiled potatoes, freshly cut tomatoes and coriander.
Literally every alternate evening this December, when work was done and everyone had left, I would get my office helper to boil the potatoes, chop the tomatoes and coriander leaves and bring me a plate to put it all together. The target was to finish the box. I went at it diligently as well.
There was a problem though. The ingredients were just too many. For someone who has not been much of a cook, this was a challenge. On day one, I took the route of taking a little bit of everything and putting it all together. The output was not bad at all.
On day two I got clever. I noticed the quantity of each ingredient was not in the same measure. It varied in the size of the slot provided for each ingredient. Each powder varied in quantity, as did the chutneys and the big block of date relish. I decided to follow the path of scientific thinking and use ratio and proportion as the norm. The end result turned out to be more delicious than ever.
On day six I ran out of three ingredients due to my earlier largesse of use. I used what was available, and the ‘chaat’ tasted nice. But different. This went on till I exhausted the box and the patience of my office helper-cum-boiler of potatoes, slicer of tomatoes and chopper of coriander leaves. Importantly, every day, the ‘chaat’ tasted different. But nice. I liked what I put together every day though.
As I sat ruminating on life in the last days of the year gone by, and as I craft this piece today, I am thinking of life more and more. Life is just like this, isn’t it really? Life is a delightful plate of ‘chaat’. It has a mix of many ingredients, and each comes in different quantities at different points in time. Each adds a dimension of taste to life itself. It all depends on the ratio and proportion of ingredients that strike the plate and eventually the palate.
At the beginning of a fresh new year, my ‘chaat box’ experience is telling me things. Telling me that every experience is a valuable ingredient that goes into making life what it is for each of us.
Sometimes the ingredients are just not available, and yet we make do. Sometimes we err, and yet make do. Sometimes we get lucky, and we strike it hard. And sometimes we run out of luck, and still, we survive. The resilience of the human persona is really something.
Life is then a delicious plate of yummy ‘chaat’. Each of us makes it on our own. While the ingredients are reasonably common, every plate of ‘chaat’ is as different as the one who made it. Life is delicious.
Just to establish that I have not gone bonkers with my thoughts, let me add the dimension of a casual research exercise I have been spending some time on over the last two years.
Whenever I have the time, I have been meeting people and asking them one simple question: If you knew you had just one year to live, how would you live that year? Would you live it differently than now? At a different pace? With a different set of priorities? With differentiated investments of time, passion and money?
I have asked 211 people to this date. I have asked this to the cab drivers who ferry me up and down the different cities I visit, the housekeeping staff at the hotels I have stayed at, professional colleagues who travel with me on road journeys, CXOs of every variety and age, and students.
Many have taken time to answer, for the question itself seems to put them at apparent unease. But answers I have received. And every one of those answers indicates a completely different way of living; at times, a diametrically opposite way of living from mine. And that is the shocker. Why do we live the way we do despite the fact that we do know that life is finite? After all, each of us has an expiry date, don’t we? And yet we don’t want to think of that date at all because we plan how to live the remaining days of our lives. Makes us discomfited. Makes us squirm.
The fact remains. Life is always lived in denial. Denial of the fact that the end reality is death. To that extent, the key question is, are we living? Or are we dying, one day at a time? Life is really a scale. While some scales are longer, some are shorter. There is a clear beginning and a clear end. And the fact is that no one really knows whose scale is shorter and whose is longer. And by how much?
In some cases, it is a terminal illness without a cure. In some cases, it has been a sudden bout of a nasty virus that just did not let go. What happens when the alarm clock of mortality goes off all of a sudden? Do we get jolted, and how? And how do we really react? And do we then look at life and all its joys and sorrows differently? And is that when we plan to really live life the way it must and is meant to be lived? Why wait for that mortality alarm to go off? In many cases, it is these crazy questions that crazy guys like me have asked 211 people who have come my way.
Why wait? Live life now, for what it is. Life is delicious. Eat it.
Harish Bijoor
Brand Guru and Founder, Harish Bijoor Consults Inc