Making wellness work…

HERE’S THE WISHING WELL, WISHING WELL…

Most of us spend a lifetime in the pursuit of wellness – at home, at the workplace, during vacations and even at strenuous family weddings. In the process, we are not only short of breath, but of answers too. But what if there were a wishing well that could enlighten us on the secrets of our well-being?

This is a new series where a Wishing Well plays Agony Aunt, with a twist. There are a couple of things you need to be ready with before you listen to some profound gyaan- a sense of humour and a pinch of salt.

Dear Wishing Well,

I've had it. I’m overworked, underpaid, short-changed, backstabbed and pushed around at the workplace. I've been slogging my backside off for years and the only thing I have to show for it is high BP. In fact, the kind of pressure that's bottled up inside me is so intense that if I had any ‘headweight’, I would have been called a pressure cooker. I must have been the only one who went into mourning when I figured out that Dec 21, 2012 wasn't the end of the world – that’s how bad things are. How do I change things at the workplace? 

How do I deal with this stress?

Yours enquiringly,

Bond Ed Leigh Burr

The Wishing Well responds thus:

Dear Bond Ed,

Stress at work is a lot like the common cold - the only way you can get rid of it is by passing it on to someone else. But to do that, you need to look for the ideal candidate. Here are six types of workplace irritants who are likely to make your life miserable – and appropriate wellness solutions for each of them.

1. Re-licks: They're the reason why the boss always looks like he's sat in a puddle – and thanks to their overactive salivary glands, they’ve been around in your organization for centuries.

Wellness solution: Switch off the lifts on health grounds - with them inside. So, while the rest of the office climbs stairs for exercise, Re-licks will be left climbing the walls.

2. Arty Fact: The name is actually a malapropism. Once you get that right, the rest would be self-explanatory.

Wellness solution: Make sure you serve health food at the workplace – it will give you an opportunity to yell for the nuts as soon as Arty Facts enter the conference room for a meeting. And peanuts will do - after all, you settle for it in the beginning of every month, don't you?

Serving nuts can also be a much-needed stress buster. During dreary presentations, you could have internal contests about throwing the peanuts up and catching them in your mouth. And during those long, unending year-end reviews, you could calm frayed nerves by making pea shooters out of rolled up sheets of paper and targeting people from other departments. The benefits of this exercise will be apparent every time the boss demands if you are going to meet the target – just aim for the back of his head and yell yes.

3. Cabin Baggage: Also known as senior management, this kind is nothing but baggage to your organization and works towards its ultimate goal –the corner cabin.

Wellness solution: Sleep deprivation can be a terrible thing, especially lack of sleep in the workplace– it can make the Cabin Baggage types very grouchy. Work towards providing the perfect ambience – dim lighting, hypnotic spiral images, beanbags and soothing pipe music wafting across the corridors of the office. Remember, the reason they say that sleep is the best cure for stress is because when the Cabin Baggage types sleep, you have no stress.

4. Fool's Cape: They think they are caped crusaders out to save the organization – the sad part is, they also think that they are too good to be working. (Superheroes don't work, you see - only their alter egos do.) A closer look at them would tell you that they should ideally exchange their cape for a cap–a dunce cap, to be specific.

Wellness solution: Your caped colleagues are extremely competitive and aggressive, so take advantage of it. Have blood pressure stations at work, with a giant mercury column on the wall on which everyone's readings can be marked with a fluorescent neon marker. Each week, there can be a BP ka Boss contest and the winner gets a mid-week dinner date – with the boss.

5. Carpetbaggers: They bag all the accolades, despite having evolved the practice of doing nothing into a fine art. All they do is wear the carpet threadbare, walking to and fro, talking into a mobile or carrying papers, and trying to look busy. Needless to say, both the call and the papers will be blank.

Wellness solution: The most irritating thing about Carpetbaggers is that they can smell work a mile away and promptly fall sick, leaving you to handle their work, in addition to yours. So, if you have a doctor friend, get him to cart along all the freebie medicines he would have received from medical reps - and conduct frequent vaccination drives at work. You can not only score brownie points with the management as the ‘employee healthcare package’ is being taken care of for free, but also ensure that your colleagues can never apply for sick leave now. For long, they've been a pain in your rear. Now, it's payback time - with a long needle and a massive syringe.

6. Carpet Bombers: The bad news is that they are senior to you. The worse news is that because of a secret pact with the management, their perks include bombing all your ideas, however good they are.

Wellness solution: Recommend Hot Yoga. (Nope, the name has nothing to do with the instructor - Hot Yoga is yoga done with the office AC switched off.) Carpet Bombers love the exotic, eccentric things in life, so this is just up their street. And when they are goaded into doing the supta padangustha nasa sparsasana or the adho mukha mandukasana with the mercury climbing to 44C, Carpet Bombers would have tied themselves into such knots that you’ll never ever suffer from loose ends when trying to tackle stress.

And since there’s a ‘buy-six, get-seven’ offer going on these days, here’s a wellness technique that you get to take home, absolutely free:

Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Associates: Sporadic acts of kindness can also help generate goodwill and create positive energy, thereby bringing a sense of wellness to the workplace. So, from time to time, when you hear banging from a cabin or a toilet, unlock the door and let your colleague out.

Now go ahead and implement these wellness programmes in your organization. Chances are, even if you don’t fix your problems, you can fix the guys who cause it.

All the best!

(Published in Ashvarttha, The Wellness Magazine, Dec 13 - Jan 14 / Issue 1 / Volume 5)

When man made God...

Oh, the folly of making a boy a God before he can turn man - he's been paying the price for it ever since.

Dear Sachin worshipper,

On Oct 10, 2013, Alice Munro won the Nobel Prize in Literature. The Prime Minister of Libya was abducted and held, before being released. Malala Yousafzai won the European Union's human rights prize. Pervez Musharraf was arrested in Islamabad for the storming of the Red Mosque in 2007. A southern state continued to burn, the Indian Rupee weakened, and Cyclone Phailin was clocking almost 200 kms per hour as it tore up everything in its path. But chances are, you wouldn't be aware of any of them. To you, there was only one event that had occurred on that day - the Little Master had announced his retirement from Test cricket. (So it did turn out that the Mayans were right about the world coming to an end, didn’t it? Only it wasn't 2012, but a year later.)

Half the nation went into depression over his retirement. Eulogies poured in from all across the cricket-playing world. But while there were nostalgic quotes and encomiums from the highest quarters, it was not all sweet-sounding music that filled the air. There was the other half, which was simply relieved. There were also the unmistakable voices complaining about an end that should have come sooner. These voices, ranging from ‘at last’ to ‘thank goodness’, marred the proceedings. And I bring this to your notice because you are responsible for it.

It is very interesting to note how we, despite having numerous religions and a multitude of Gods, still look to create idols amongst men, by putting them on a pedestal, and by worshipping them. And by doing that, we deny them their basic right – the right to be human, and to fail at times.

Call him old, call his hand-eye coordination jaded, call him out of form, but it has to be said that even during the worst of times, he has been able to hold his own. And yet, there were loud jeers when he chose to continue after all those who came into the limelight much after him had retired. There were the usual debates about him playing for records and not for his team. There were the voices of dissent that criticized him for not being a big-match player.

His problems went beyond age and his failures on the field – they had more to do with the fact that you deified him and elevated him to a position above mortals. There's not a stadium in the country where he has not been declared a God of a religion called cricket. But then, Gods have to perform miracles all the time. Gods cannot fail. Gods would have to be more punctual than superheroes in saving the world. And where there are worshippers, there are bound to be the atheists, whose sole focus in life would be to disprove the existence of God.

And that was how you, who wished to project him in a larger-than-life image, ended up making him the target of those who were critical of a willow-wielding God in their midst. To them, it was understandable if Lara didn't pull his team out of a hole whenever they caved in. Ponting could lose two Ashes series in a short span and expect to go back to a home where the glass windows were still intact. But your God had none of these luxuries. He was omnipresent – he was both on a pedestal as well as under a microscope. And you put him there.

Because you made him God, the detractors waited to prove you – and him – wrong. Because God would always have to be on their side – the winning side. It didn't matter that he took the team all the way into the finals of the 2003 World Cup. God was supposed to have scored a 100 in the finals as well. It didn't matter that he stood out in many an overseas tour as the only player to have notched up 50s and 100s – God didn't get his team to win.

You can argue that cricket is a team game and that the other 10 needed to take up responsibility as well. But that would apply only to a team comprising 11 mortals, not 10 mortals and a God.

You can close your ears, but you cannot shut out the noise from the naysayers, a terribly distracting cacophony that outshouts the lovely paeans of praise being sung, much like a local loudspeaker disturbing the harmony of an opera in progress. He doesn't deserve it. He deserves better than a divided house where the question 'Why?' being asked by half the population is being drowned out by a resounding 'Why not?' from the other half.

If only you had stayed a fan instead of becoming a worshipper. If only you had let him remain a legend instead of making him God.

Yours sincerely,

A disappointed cricket fan.

(Published in The Hindu Sunday Supplement on 20 October, 2013)

It’s a bird, it’s a plane - it’s just a man!

Pic courtesy: The Hindu

L Suresh visits an era in which superheroes wear blue, red, green, yellow and black, but display only one shade – grey.

Two little boys were hiding behind a barrel, watching their fruit-seller dad being pounded to pulp by the street thugs. He hadn't paid the mafia its cut, parts of which would go to the boss, the local politician, government officials, law enforcement officers, judges and everyone else who was on the take. With tear-laden eyes and fear-stricken hearts, the young duo shrank back into their hiding place, waiting for the goons to disappear with their father's earnings. Tonight, there would be no supper. And tomorrow, if their dad didn't pay up, there would be no shop either.

What those kids – and the rest of the world – needed was a comforting thought that they could go to bed with. One promising them that tomorrow would be better, that the bad guys could get beaten, that someone stronger would come and fight evil, that fathers could tend to their business without being bludgeoned into handing over their earnings to the underworld.

While this could have been the opening scenes of a superhero story, it was reality back in the late 20s and the early 30s, when the United States had a huge fall from the heady heights of economic progress and went into a tailspin. It is ironical that prohibition was brought into effect in the 1920s to eliminate the evils of alcohol, like corruption, crime, poverty, violence and a debauched society, because it brought in the evils of bootlegging and spurious hooch - corruption, crime, poverty, violence and a debauched society.

Thus, a massive stock market crash had brought in much grief and the great depression, political decisions had ushered in prohibition - and poverty had introduced crime. The United States found itself shackled, handcuffed and strait-jacketed, all at the same time. And it would take magic of Houdini-esque proportions to come out of it.

Come 1933, a new government would begin infusing life into the economy, but people needed a little spark that would rekindle hope in their hearts, assuring them that all would be well. Their prayers were answered with more than a spark - what ensued was an explosion in a faraway planet named Krypton. And a little space shuttle found its way to earth, lodging itself in a little field in Kansas. Blue and red, the united colours of America, now stood for a saviour, one who could straighten anything from a crooked rail track to a crooked mind, and who fought for the downtrodden and oppressed, ensuring that justice prevailed.

Superman was immediately followed by Batman, Captain Marvel, the Green Lantern and a galaxy of other superheroes. While the superheroes were attired in an eclectic mix of colours, the stories were all black and white. The plots were simple - it was good versus evil, there would be no cross overs and good would always triumph. The superhero's alter ego would either be a dead ringer for Mr. Bean, a bumbling, inept, clueless friendly idiot, or Sir Percy Blakeney, the dashing playboy from The Scarlet Pimpernel. Crime would never pay. And the good, harmless, innocent people would always be saved in the end.

‘Saved in the end’ was the operative phrase that lifted a nation's spirits. Across generations, they took to the tales like repentant smokers to a nicotine patch. Soon, with each passing decade, memories of fear and suffering faded away, and subsequent generations disinherited the scarred legacy of their ancestors. To them, America was always the land of opportunity, where everyone owned houses, drove in cars and had weekend barbecue parties in their backyards. So, who needed superheroes? Besides, who on earth would believe in men flying around in ridiculous costumes? Superheroes were soon relegated to story-telling sessions for children - adults had no use for them.

But evolution is not always a good thing. And not fixing something when it isn't broke isn't such a bad thing either. Unfortunately, our superheroes, who had successfully warded off ageing, fashion trends, technology (don't point to the batmobile - it made its first appearance in 1939) and makeovers over the decades, met their nemesis when the publishers decided to update the psychographics of the caped crusaders to suit the tastes of modern audiences. So, from giving mankind hope to live through the era of corruption and the great depression, the superheroes, until then beacons of hope for the downtrodden, ended up being reflections of today's complex, dysfunctional generation.

Batman's alter ego became a playboy who would enjoy heady nights and suffer terrible hangovers the morning after. Spiderman began to secretly enjoy the dark side to his arachnid powers. Superman had to contend with a complicated romance, his feelings for another man's wife and worse, a child born out of wedlock. Iron Man's inner self - Tony Stark - had to battle alcoholism, Captain America went under the influence of meth, Robin got insanely addicted to violence and the Human Torch's bisexuality has become an ongoing topic for online banter.

Perhaps the changing times necessitated new-age personas - not the kinds that people would look up to, but the kinds that people would identify with. The result? Mighty men, whose hands trembled without their regular fix, superheroes who found themselves in confusing relationships, and protectors and avengers who, when they were not fighting monsters and aliens, were fighting their own inner demons.

Hindu mythology defines the four major yugas (epochs) as satya yuga, where there was only good, treta yuga where both good and bad existed, but were kept away from each other, dwapara yuga where good and bad had to coexist in the same paradigm and kali yuga, the present age, where the bad existed inside every good and the good inside every bad. One will never know if the images of a young Krishna holding the Govardhan hill on his little finger or of Hanuman uprooting Mount Sanjeevani and flying off with it inspired the creators of superheroes halfway across the world, but they sure seem to have taken the concept of kali yuga rather seriously. As a result, the Jekyll-Hyde syndrome has been turned on its head - Jekyll has become a badass with a history of substance abuse and when he's not busy imbibing this or inhaling that, he turns into his other badass version - Hyde. And that brings back the 1930s all over again. It's once again time for children to go and hide.