Inverted: Unobvious Reflections Towards A Better Life

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So you think you are the person in the mirror. That time should be put to use savagely. That happiness is elusive, and goals are best achieved by extracting from nature. Hang on.

In fact, hang your views upside down for a counter perspective. Where your closest representation is the universe. Time is best utilized not when filled in but when emptied out. Where mere aligning with nature secures your goal, where happiness can be bred in your backyard, where....

Inverted won't just yield a better view. It will enhance your life too.

Working with companies like ITC, JWT, Pepsi and currently Nestlé, as Senior Vice President, Arvind Bhandari picks up the finest ingredients of consumer psyche. Blending with his academic grounding in Humanities, Law and Management acquired at St. Stephen's, SP Jain and IMD Lausanne, he serves up a refreshing menu of perspectives designed for our times.

For centuries, we have had a pattern to our lives doing small little things that help us get through each day. From brushing, bathing, feeding, drinking to walking, excreting, grooming, courting, socializing, entertaining, sleeping - just surviving in human skin is a hectic pre- occupation. Add to that, more long term activities like education or occupation wherein the benefits are not visible immediately but the mind has to work no less. Not to forget the abstract things we engage in to derive meaning in life such as religion, arts, chasing a calling etc. and our mind gets intersected with multiple concerns. If any space is left, it's filled promptly with spurts of worries, concerns, thrills or mindless mundanities. Consequently, the mind is now choc-a- bloc. Orderliness needs to be restored, to contain and direct thinking, otherwise we could overheat like a stressed machine and shut down.

Thankfully, our evolutionary learning comes to rescue through the gift of efficiency. Stopping repeatedly to think about what we are doing will delay or cancel our multitudinous activities. So we resort to scanning all the activities to take away active mental participation wherever possible. Brushing, bathing require little thinking so we delegate these to our reflexes operating out of our spine, freeing the mind for more satisfactory cerebral indulgences. We try to manage more of it, freeing up more mental space to accomplish more work: watching TV, downing a pack of chips and listening to your spouse, all at the same time. We learn to multitask.

We don't stop at freeing our mind from simple tasks alone. Addicted, we carry the tendency to complex, more substantial issues. So much, that we give equal emphasis to brushing as asking ourselves who am I really? Or why am I constantly in a rush to fill my time with things to do? Why am I chasing other people's dreams and achievements as my own? Is this a past prejudice masquerading as current perspective? Or, simply, is it happiness that I am chasing or something else?

Questioning is anathema when so much needs to be done because it will waste scarce time. Yet we could pause and question once in a while, or just once for the entire while, dedicatedly and earnestly. Underneath our routine endeavors, we could be chasing an idea of a future, doing things out of a mistaken impression of self- capability in the context of others, and achieving and not achieving what we set out to do, with an insufficient understanding of the world. But considering the criticality of all this can we afford to not question at all? Because looking within the assumptions of our behavior, may actually change our perspective.

It might infact invert it.

We may realize that we are not entirely the physical self we groom; that our obsession with filling our time is actually emptying out the meaning inherent in it; that catching up with other's ideals may not be all; that happiness as we understand it will always be facile and extracting from the world is sub-optimal compared to aligning with it; that perceptions driving our action are really pre-ceptions formed before; that rational thinking is inadequate compared to feeling, that...

We could have arrived at some answers contrary to our beliefs, had we persisted to question, but we evaded them, perhaps, because we felt that the answers would fall somewhere between the abstract psychology and forbidding religion.