Jordan B. Peterson is a professor of psychology at the University of Toronto. Formerly a professor at Harvard University, he was nominated for its prestigious Levenson Teaching Prize. In this book, 12 Rules For Life: An Antidote to Chaos, he combines ancient wisdom with decades of experience to provide twelve profound and challenging principles for how to live a meaningful life, from setting your house in order before criticising others to comparing yourself to who you were yesterday, not someone else today.
Let’s read an excerpt from this fascinating book.
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RULES? MORE RULES? REALLY? Isn’t life complicated enough, restricting enough, without abstract rules that don’t take our unique, individual situations into account? And given that our brains are plastic, and all develop differently based on our life experiences, why even expect that a few rules might be helpful to us all?
People don’t clamour for rules, even in the Bible . . . as when Moses comes down the mountain, after a long absence, bearing the tablets inscribed with ten commandments, and finds the Children of Israel in revelry. They’d been Pharaoh’s slaves and subject to his tyrannical regulations for four hundred years, and after that Moses subjected them to the harsh desert wilderness for another forty years, to purify them of their slavishness. Now, free at last, they are unbridled, and have lost all control as they dance wildly around an idol, a golden calf, displaying all manner of corporeal corruption.
“I’ve got some good news . . . and I’ve got some bad news,” the lawgiver yells to them. “Which do you want first?”
“The good news!” the hedonists reply.
“I got Him from fifteen commandments down to ten!”
“Hallelujah!” cries the unruly crowd. “And the bad?”
“Adultery is still in.”
So rules there will be—but, please, not too many. We are ambivalent about rules, even when we know they are good for us. If we are spirited souls, if we have character, rules seem restrictive, an affront to our sense of agency and our pride in working out our own lives. Why should we be judged according to another’s rule?
And judged we are. After all, God didn’t give Moses “The Ten Suggestions,” he gave Commandments; and if I’m a free agent, my first reaction to a command might just be that nobody, not even God, tells me what to do, even if it’s good for me. But the story of the golden calf also reminds us that without rules we quickly become slaves to our passions—and there’s nothing freeing about that.
And the story suggests something more: unchaperoned, and left to our own untutored judgment, we are quick to aim low and worship qualities that are beneath us—in this case, an artificial animal that brings out our own animal instincts in a completely unregulated way. The old Hebrew story makes it clear how the ancients felt about our prospects for civilized behaviour in the absence of rules that seek to elevate our gaze and raise our standards.
One neat thing about the Bible story is that it doesn’t simply list its rules, as lawyers or legislators or administrators might; it embeds them in a dramatic tale that illustrates why we need them, thereby making them easier to understand. Similarly, in this book Professor Peterson doesn’t just propose his twelve rules, he tells stories, too, bringing to bear his knowledge of many fields as he illustrates and explains why the best rules do not ultimately restrict us but instead facilitate our goals and make for fuller, freer lives…
Order is where the people around you act according to well understood social norms, and remain predictable and cooperative. It’s the world of social structure, explored territory, and familiarity. The state of Order is typically portrayed, symbolically—imaginatively—as masculine. It’s the Wise King and the Tyrant, forever bound together, as society is simultaneously structure and oppression.
Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens. Chaos emerges, in trivial form, when you tell a joke at a party with people you think you know and a silent and embarrassing chill falls over the gathering. Chaos is what emerges more catastrophically when you suddenly find yourself without employment, or are betrayed by a lover. As the antithesis of symbolically masculine order, it’s presented imaginatively as feminine. It’s the new and unpredictable suddenly emerging in the midst of the commonplace familiar. It’s Creation and Destruction, the source of new things and the destination of the dead (as nature, as opposed to culture, is simultaneously birth and demise).
Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.* Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white— and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.
For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.
And that’s much better than happiness.
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Category: Excerpts
The Diary of a Domestic Diva by Shilpa Shetty Kundra – An Excerpt
Shilpa Shetty Kundra is a renowned film and TV actor, businesswoman, author of The Great Indian Diet, entrepreneur and health enthusiast. She has always been a trendsetter, whether it be fashion or ideas. In her latest book, The Diary of a Domestic Diva, the actor and entrepreneur brings you fifty of her most special recipes-some of which feature in her popular Sunday Binge videos on Instagram.
Here’s an excerpt from the introduction to this book by Sanjeev Kapoor.
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What I like most about Shilpa’s approach to food is that it’s very honest. She belies the notion many of us have about stars: that they live by strict diets and don’t eat as they please. Shilpa, as you will discover through this book, is a dedicated foodie and loves to eat. I have known her for a long time now and I can tell you that she certainly knows when to stop eating too, one of the key factors in maintaining a healthy body weight.
The Diary of a Domestic Diva is straight from her kitchen and offers a mix of healthy recipes, favourite recipes, famous recipes with a twist and guilt-free desserts. The idea behind the book is very heartening. It features recipes that do not take much of your time and leave you free to do other things. Through this book, she touches upon a beautiful point: Women need not be tied to the kitchen stove all day. Give a woman nutritious and fast-to-cook recipes and she will have the time to step out to do what she pleases. It’s a cookbook with a message: Women ought to have some ‘me’ time. In my conversations with her, she has often mentioned the way, back in the day, her mother (a brilliant cook) would cook with the paucity of time as she was a working woman. I know it is all this that has led her to put together this book for the working woman. Being a family person, every aspect of her life draws from her experiences with people close to her. Her father’s love for food and yet his fitness is another inspiration that has worked so well for her. The recipes mentioned here have been tried out by her and I can vouch for their deliciousness. The fact that I drop everything when there’s an invite to her lovely ome for a meal is proof! The twists she adds to traditional recipes are delightful to say the least. The Diary of a Domestic Diva is about indulging your love for good food. And when such a message comes from one of the fittest people in town, you do sit up and take notice. Shilpa maintains that good food makes us happy and we shouldn’t feel guilty about something that makes us happy, and over the years this is something I have come to believe too.
With this sure-to-be-a-bestseller cookbook, Shilpa also enters the space of celebrity cooks and it delights the chef in me to see the world get so interested in food. It is indeed one more brownie point for the food industry.
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5 Vignettes that will make you Reminiscent of your Teen Years
Swati Kaushal is the bestselling author of five highly acclaimed novels, including Piece of Cake, Drop Dead, Lethal Spice, and her most recent work, A Few Good Friends. An alumna of Lady Shri Ram College, New Delhi, and an MBA from IIM Calcutta, Swati has worked with Nestlé India and Nokia, India. Her book, A Girl Like Me, is the story of sixteen-year-old Anisha Rai, packed with the breathless exuberance of teenage life.
Let’s read through 5 poignant instances from the book that will immediately strike a chord!
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Catalyst by Chandramouli Venkatesan – An Excerpt
Chandramouli Venkatesan is a corporate veteran with over twenty-six years of experience in the industry. He has worked with Asian Paints, Cadbury/Mondelez, Mirc Electronics/Onida and Pidilite. He has served in various senior capacities, including as CEO and managing director. He has conducted numerous speaking sessions, which have benefited over 1000 people, and mentored and guided many others to be successful in their careers. His book, Catalyst, will arm you with the right tools to succeed at your workplace and get the most out of every moment, every day.
Let’s read an excerpt from this life-transforming book.
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In all my experiences and travels across the world, the one thing that stands out is the hunger for success that most people have and, in particular, Indians have. Often that hunger for success can be simplified by most people as success and growth in careers. That success in life is equal to success in careers is often the operating assumption of most people. In the latter portion of the book I do try to give a more holistic dimension to success in life to include values, character and other related aspects. However, in the first half of the book I focus primarily on giving what people want—the keys to success in careers.
I have a simple equation for career growth
Career growth = Real Individual growth +_ Environmental aspects
What this equation tries to say is that career growth is driven by two factors—real individual growth and environmental aspects. Real Individual growth is the growth we experience in the duration of our careers; how much each one of us grow our knowledge, our skills, our judgement, our influence, our communication etc. The second factor is Environmental aspects, which covers things like buoyancy of the job market, industry related factors, relative availability of talent in your skill areas etc.
Let me first cover the impact of environmental aspects on career growth. Our careers are typically 40 years long, we start in our 20s and wind up in our 60s. During these 40 years we will have both environmental tailwinds and headwinds to our careers. An example of a tailwind would be the times in your careers where the job market is hyper hot for the skills you have, there is a shortage of the skills you bring and people tend to get jobs and salaries bigger than what they deserve, sometimes going all the way to bubbles. Another example of a tailwind is when your boss quits the company, you are not yet fully ready to take that role, but the company decides it would rather go with an insider and hence gives the job to you even when you are not yet fully ready. Such tailwinds are bound to support most of us at times in our careers.
Similarly, we have all experienced headwinds in our careers. There are times when the economy is dragging, the job market is weak and there are very few opportunities for people to grow. Another example of a headwind is when you have been steadily getting ready for a big job, equipping yourself with the right experiences, apprenticing under the right leaders and preparing yourself for the opportunity and when the opportunity comes the company in its wisdom decides it wants to drive change, wants new thinking and a change in strategy and hence prefers to hire an outsider into the role as opposed to promoting an insider. Nothing you did wrong, but the dice did not roll your way.
My experience is that in a 40-year career, the headwinds and the tailwinds balance each other out. You will have some headwinds in your career as well as some tailwinds. You have to be a very lucky person for the tailwinds over 40 years to be greater than the headwinds and similarly you have to be very unlucky for the headwinds over 40 years to be greater than the tailwinds. For most people the two does balance out. Hence going back to our career growth equation, it means that the environmental aspects will not be deciding factor in driving career growth.
The catalyst of career growth tends to be real Individual growth. Simply said, in your career you will experience as much career growth as you are able to grow yourself as an individual and as a professional, what I call real individual growth. If you manage to grow your skills, your knowledge, your decision making, your judgement, your influence on others, your communication etc. then you will experience career growth. Career growth is directly proportional to and is a function of the real individual growth. You experience career growth if you manage to grow yourself during your career, if you stop pushing yourself at any stage the career growth also comes to a screeching halt.
Hence the equation of career growth can be simplified to
Career growth = Real Individual growth
One way I like to state this is the expression, “you get what you deserve”. Far too often in our careers we focus on the getting part of it, we focus on getting the promotion, getting the new job and getting career growth. We do not focus on deserving more, increasing our capabilities, our skills etc. In a career, you get what you deserve. It is useful to remember what is in our hands—focusing on deserving more and driving our real individual growth.
‘Taslima and Bhimsen steal the show’: Scenes from an award night
Taslima Nasrin is an eminent writer and secular humanist who has been subjected to forced banishment and multiple fatwas. She has been living in exile since 1994. For her powerful writing on women’s rights and uncompromising criticism of religious fundamentalism, the Bengali original of this book, Split: A Life, was banned by the Left Front in West Bengal as well as the Government of Bangladesh. Bold and evocative, Split: A Life opens a window to the experiences and works of one of the bravest writers of our times.
Here’s an excerpt from this powerful book.
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I asked for forgiveness because I had dared to accept such an exalted award despite being such an insignificant entity, for having shown the audacity even though I was utterly undeserving. Who knew if anyone forgave me in the end! After the event many writers and artists came up to congratulate me and I spoke to people I had never imagined I would have the opportunity to speak to. The day after, the news of the award ceremony was published on the front page of Anandabazar Patrika along with the headline ‘Taslima and Bhimsen steal the show’. Celebrations were being held all around me. Soumitra Mitra was very happy with how things had turned out and he was taking me to various places to meet various people. He surprised me with a visit to Rabindrasangeet exponent Kanika Bandyopadhyay. I was an ardent admirer of Kanika and standing in front of her was like a wave of euphoria had swept over my entire world. Ashesh and Mona, my companions during the Basanta Utsab trip, came to see me and took a bunch of photographs. I was suddenly an important person who no longer had to walk hunched along the corridors of Anandabazar and everyone knew who I was. Sagarmoy Ghosh offered me a chance to write a serialized novel for Desh. Floored by the offer I confessed I did not know how to write a novel. He smiled but did not rescind his offer. Nikhil Sarkar invited me to his Salt Lake residence and gave me a bunch of letters with which to go and meet a number of well-known people. Dutifully, the small writer with the big award took the letters with her and hesitantly went to pay a visit to the big guns. Mahasweta Devi, Meera Mukhopadhyay and many others—stars one was meant to show respect to when reaching for the sky. Whether I was even near the sky or I was where I had always been, I could scarcely tell for sure; I stood in front of the celebrities with all my insecurities and remonstrations intact. There was a trend in Calcutta to touch the feet of senior writers and artists to pay them one’s respects. Unused to the custom, I could not help but stand stiffly in front of most people I met. I had never managed to grasp the Bengali Muslim version of the same ritual either, the kadambushi. Though my heart was full of respect, I refrained from touching people’s feet and this must have irked many a senior, made them think of me as an upstart. But there was hardly anything I could do about it. If I was suddenly asked to till the field was I not supposed to stand there dumbstruck? It was impossible for me to abruptly start doing something I had never done before.
Despite not being one for formalities, I loved giving the small gifts I had brought from Bangladesh to my friends and well-wishers in Calcutta. Aveek Sarkar had handed the Ananda Puraskar to me and it was only right that I gift him a small token in return. So I took the multi-coloured jamdani sari I had worn for the award function, got its ornate border cut and had it framed in the best golden frame from a renowned framing shop on Park Street. When I reached the Anandabazar offices with my gift, Nikhil Sarkar was astounded by my daring. What I had failed to grasp was that for an art connoisseur and a man of such refined tastes as Aveek Sarkar, the limits of what he preferred among Indian art objects was probably defined by the Maqbool Fida Husain I saw adorning the walls. Otherwise, everything else was surely works by famous Western artists and painters. A jamdani sari border, no matter how beautiful, was not something that could possibly hope to be displayed in his room. I could not help but think to myself that the women behind such exquisite work were no less great artists, but the tasteful and the rich hardly considered them worthy of their attention. It was fortuitous that I had not turned up at Aveek Sarkar’s office directly with the framed piece of jamdani. Nikhil Sarkar advised that if I was bent on giving the gift to someone I should give it to Aveek Sarkar’s wife. Swallowing my discomfiture I did exactly that and managed to save Sarkar, the giant of Anandabazar, from any further embarrassment. A leading bureaucrat of the Bangladeshi consulate invited me and some authors to his place, primarily in my honour. As soon as I arrived the poets and writers of Calcutta surrounded me and inundated me with questions. So many questions of so many kinds— renaissance, revolution, feminism, backlash, modernism, postmodernism, my literary ideology, political beliefs, class struggle and so on. They waited for me to reply with startling answers while all I could do was stare at them in wide-eyed wonder. The questions appeared incomprehensible to me and seeing my bafflement they too began glancing at each other in surprise. Embarrassed, I wanted to curl up like a snail and disappear from the star-studded gathering, simply vanish without a trace. I did not want to answer any questions because I had no answers to give.
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Coffee Can Investing The Low Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth – An Excerpt
Most people invest in the usual assets: real estate, gold, mutual funds, fixed deposits and stock markets. It’s always the same four or five instruments. All they end up making is a measly 8 to 12 per cent per annum. What if there was another way? In Coffee Can Investing, Saurabh will show you how to go about low-risk investments that generate great returns.
Here’s an excerpt from this book.
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“The ancient Romans were used to being defeated. Like the rulers of history’s great empires, they could lose battle after battle but still win the war. An empire that cannot sustain a blow and remain standing is not really an empire.” – Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind 18 (2011)
Many historians take the view that the “greatness” of a kingdom or an empire should be measured by its longevity. How long did the empire sustain? How durable was the empire? By this measure the first great empire was arguably the Persian Empire. Founded around 550 BC, it lasted for around 200 years until Alexander the Great brought it to an end in 330 BC by defeating King Darius III. However, if longevity is the measure of a great empire, then the Roman Empire is by some distance the greatest empire that the world has ever seen. Whilst the first Roman republic, headquartered in Rome, lasted from 100 BC to 400 AD, the imperial successor to the Republic lasted for a staggering 1400 years before falling to the Ottoman Turks in 1453. So ubiquitous is the influence of this empire, the language in which we are writing this book, the legal system which underpins the contract between the publisher and the authors of this book, the mathematical concept of compounding which underpins much of this book, all of them come more or less directly from the Roman Empire!
When it comes to investing in stock markets, greatness is defined as ‘the ability of a company to grow whilst sustaining its moats over long periods of time’. This then enables such great companies to sustain superior financial performance over several decades. The Coffee Can philosophy of investing is built using the twin filters to identify great companies that have the DNA to sustain their competitive advantages over 10-20 years (or longer). This is because ‘greatness’, which the coffee can portfolio seeks, is not temporary and it is surely not a short-term phenomenon. Greatness does not change from one quarterly result to another. In fact, great companies can endure difficult economic conditions.
Their growth is not beholden to domestic or global growth – they thrive in economic down cycles as well. Great companies do not get disrupted by evolution in their customers’ preferences or competitors or operational aspects of their business. Their management teams have strategies that deliver results better than their competition can. These great companies effectively separate themselves from competition using these strategies. Over time, they learn from their mistakes and increase the distance between themselves and their competition. Often, such companies appear conservative. However, they do not confuse conservatism with complacency – these companies simply bide their time for making the right moves. These traits are common among great companies and rarely found outside great companies.
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The Diary of a Domestic Diva by Shilpa Shetty Kundra – Recipe Excerpt
Shilpa Shetty Kundra is a renowned film and TV actor, businesswoman, author of The Great Indian Diet, entrepreneur and health enthusiast. With Shilpa Shetty’s quick and hassle-free methods, The Diary of a Domestic Diva makes cooking good food easy. These favourites of the Shetty-Kundra household have been created to give you variety, taste and the occasional food coma.
Let’s read this recipe which will give us a peek into the world of the Domestic Diva!
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Shilpa’s Treasure Pulao
This is a simple pulao recipe that I whip up when I am struggling to decide what to cook. It pairs well with cucumber raita, dal, chicken or any other curry. It’s a permanent fixture at all occasions, arties or pujas at my house and is always appreciated by guests.
Serves: 3
Nutritional value:
768 kcal (Carbs: 53 g,
Protein: 4 g, Fats: 60 g )
3 tbsp vegetable oil
1 big onion, julienned
1 bay leaf
3 star anise
2 black cardamoms
5 cloves
1 tsp coriander powder
1 tsp cumin powder
1 tbsp garam masala
Juice of ½ lemon
1 tsp salt
½ tsp cayenne pepper
½ tsp black pepper powder
½ cup fresh corn
1 tbsp ghee
1 cup basmati rice, washed and soaked for 15minutes
2 cups water
1 veg or chicken stock cube, soaked in 4 tbsp warm water
- Heat the vegetable oil in a wok on medium heat and fry the onions till they are golden brown. Next, add the bay leaf, star anise, black cardamoms and cloves. Mix well.
- Add the powdered spices and mix for a couple of minutes till they are fragrant.
- Add the corn, making sure it is partly cooked before you add the rice. You can also steam it separately if you want to save time.
- Mix in the ghee and the rice, along with water, vegetable stock and lemon juice. Cook for 15 minutes in a pressure cooker. If you want to cook it without pressure, then add 1¾ cup water. Season well and serve hot after removing the whole spices.
Variation: Check if the vegetable cubes are low in salt. Normally, stock cubes are pre-salted, so I hunt for the low-sodium ones. You can substitute corn with green peas or chicken. Nonvegetarians can substitute the vegetable stock cubes with chicken stock cubes.
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India in Slow Motion by Mark Tully – An Excerpt
Mark Tully worked for the BBC in South Asia for 25 years and now works as a journalist in New Delhi. His books include No Full Stops In India, The Heart of India and Lives of Jesus. In India in Slow Motion, Mark Tully covers subjects as diverse as Hindu extremism, bonded child labour, Sufi mysticism, the crisis in agriculture, the persistence of political corruption and the problem of Kashmir.
Let’s read an excerpt from this book.
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On the last Sunday we met another priest who had not found change easy. When we were sitting in a pew waiting for mass to start in Old Goa’s Se Cathedral, a small, elderly but remarkably spry priest came up to us wearing not the usual white cassock but an old fashioned, tight-fitting black one with a traditional high dog-collar. He asked whether I was a Portuguese speaker and when I told him I didn’t know a word of the language he said, ‘I usually ask foreigners that because I love speaking Portuguese but I don’t get much chance nowadays.’
I asked why the exterior of his cathedral was now yellow instead of the traditional Goan white and this provoked a diatribe against the Archaeological Survey of India which had taken over responsibility from the church for the monuments of Old Goa. ‘We can’t do anything to our own cathedral now,’ he fumed, hopping from one foot to the other in his anger. ‘We even have to get permission to put up a new collection box, and what do they do to preserve the church? Nothing.’ As evidence he took me to the west end and showed me piles of rubble where the plaster was peeling from the pillars.
I had noticed that his cassock had purple piping and purple buttons so I asked, ‘Does the purple mean you are a monsignor?’
‘No. But I am Father Adolpho Joviano Castro Viegas, a canon of the cathedral and the parish priest and that is just as senior.’
Having been put straight about that, I went on to ask, ‘In the cathedral, do you keep up the old traditions of worship?’
‘Of course I try to, but what can we do? We don’t have money to pay for the choirs and all that you need for proper ritual, and the bishop doesn’t care either. The Portuguese bishop used to come here regularly with full pomp and devotion. The present one only comes about four times a year. I love the full ritual and singing, it lifts your heart.’
The peppery priest then left me to robe for the chapter mass. The vast cathedral was far from full when Father Adolpho and six other equally elderly canons entered through the south aisle. Robed in splendid green copes they walked in a solemn procession, accompanied by just one server, to the altar at the top of the chancel steps. Six of the canons including Adolpho took their seats in high backed chairs behind the altar and one stood at the altar to celebrate the mass with dignity and solemnity. He was accompanied by a small choir in the organ loft.
Looking at the magnificent gilded reredos crowned by the figure of Christ on the cross just below the white-barrelled ceiling of the sanctuary, I couldn’t help but think of the Portuguese who had built this monument to impress Goans with the majesty of a God who lived on high. I knew that the church had to change, to bring God down to earth, if it was to survive in independent India, but I also acknowledged that I came from the old tradition, the tradition Father Adolpho was preserving. I found it easier to worship God in majesty, rather than God the social worker who battles for the poor, or God the personal pal of the charismatics.
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In the Name of God by Ravi Subramanian – An Excerpt
Ravi Subramanian, an alumnus of IIM Bangalore, has spent two decades working his way up the ladder of power in the amazingly exciting and adrenaline-pumping world of global banks in India. Four of Ravi’s eight bestselling titles have been award winners. His latest thriller, In the Name of God, revolves around the Anantha Padmanabha Swamy Temple in Thiruvananthapuram that safeguards within its sacrosanct walls centuries of customs and rituals, unimaginable wealth and an unwavering calm. Until a dead body turns up in its holy pond. . . and then another.
Let’s read an excerpt from this gripping novel.
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Nirav Choksi, a name the who’s who of Mumbai had on their speed dial, designed and manufactured customized jewellery for the rich and famous all over the world. He was often referred to as the Indian Joel Arthur Rosenthal, one of the world’s most exclusive jewellers whose high-flying clientele included Elizabeth Taylor, Elle Macpherson, Kim Kardashian, Michelle Obama and even the Princess of Jordan. Nirav Choksi’s client list boasted the marquee names on the social circuit—politicians, wealthy Indian businessmen, film stars. Choksi wielded a fair bit of clout on the jewellery trade in the country. A man with both contacts and influence, he was an extremely sought-after guy in the political circuit for skills which went beyond jewellery design.
Like Rosenthal, he too made fifty to sixty pieces of jewellery a year. Connoisseurs recognized an NC piece the moment they saw it. From traditional to contemporary, he designed them all, never repeating a design. A man with a huge ego, Nirav crafted his own designs and would get very upset if a client tried to dictate to him. He was once overheard saying that he preferred international clients to Indians, not because they paid more, but because in India every woman thought she was the best designer in the world. There were times when he had refused to sell a piece of jewellery because he felt the ornament would not look good on the client—such was his pride in his craft. Every stone is a canvas and every item of jewellery is a piece of art, he would say. Advertisements and self-promotion were not Nirav’s style. According to him, ‘word of mouth’ was what helped him get and retain clients. Even his office in Zaveri Bazaar was a thousand square-foot pigeonhole in the basement of Pancharathna Complex.
Zaveri Bazaar was the nerve centre of the jewellery trade not only in Mumbai, but the whole of India. Roughly sixty per cent of India’s gold trade passed through the narrow overcrowded lanes of the bazaar. The shabby buildings lining the sides of the main road held crores of rupees worth of gold, diamonds and jewellery, all stored in lockers built into the walls of the small stores, said to be strong enough to withstand any kind of robbery attempt, earthquake or bomb blast. The Government of India’s attempts to move the diamond and jewellery trade to a snazzy new building in Bandra Kurla Complex, an upmarket suburb in Mumbai, had been met with resistance. Many jewellers, led by Nirav Choksi, were Zaveri Bazaar loyalists and unwilling to move to the government-sponsored yet privately owned BKC Diamond Bourse.
Nirav had one more office in the neighbourhood. Apart from the basement office in Pancharathna Complex, he also had a small workshop a few buildings away where his trusted and most skilled workers crafted the pieces that he so painstakingly designed.
That day, he had just stepped into his basement office when his phone rang.
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Code Name God by Mani Bhaumik; An Excerpt
Mani Lal Bhoumik is an Indian-born American physicist and writer. Enriching and inspirational, his bestseller, Code Name God: The Spiritual Odyssey of a Man of Science, strikes a perfect balance between spirituality and science to explain the deep concepts that seem to be giving shape and meaning to our lives.
Let’s read an excerpt from this book which the author terms as his personal odyssey.
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After Friedrich Nietzsche’s proclamation that God is dead, humankind seemed to sink into a slough of despair, sometimes bordering on panic, since we were fearful that we had lost all sense of direction. Sigmund Freud, the father of modern psychology, urged people to regard God as an illusion, nothing more. He said our concept of God only symbolized an infantile desire for a father figure, and we should outgrow this desire. Science should replace God, Freud decreed, explaining: “Science is not an illusion. But it would be an illusion to suppose that we could get anywhere else what it cannot give us.”
But science also proved to be a false god, and its worldview left many despondent, among them even the atheistic philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre, who wrote of “the Godshaped hole in the human head” through which the Creator had been forcibly extracted. From the mind-matter dualism of Descartes to the iconoclasm of Nietzsche and Marx, from the existentialism of Sartre to the counterfeit reality of the Matrix movies, the split between man and maker has long been widening, and many acknowledged that the wedge was Science with a capital “S.” Specifi- cally, classical physics, with its mechanistic view of the cosmos, had cut God from man’s psyche, leaving in its postoperative haste an open wound of spiritual despair, tyranny, and endless war.
The truth is, both spirituality and science are essential to human beings and always have been. Strangely enough, the same scientific method that once compelled us to question the existence of God is now, by way of advanced physics and cosmology, developing evidence that tends to support our age-old belief in a transcendent power.
A sea change has occurred, though many readers of Time may not have oriented themselves yet to a quantum universe: where the same tiny particle may occupy two places at one time or react instantly to events light years away; where the net energy of the cosmos is zero, yet there is more energy in the vacuum of space than in all the stars; where physics is close to proving that material reality emerges from a common source, which I’ll refer to as the primary field. Is this the field where God has been at play all along? Can humankind tune in God’s frequency once again? I believe we can, in part by means of our own quantum leap in consciousness.
The ideas and observations I offer in the following pages surely cannot span the measure of that leap, for your own full participation is essential. Perhaps, though, my story will encourage you to take a further step on life’s greatest journey. (If you are reading this book, you’ve already embarked!)
This is the memoir of my quest for a new kind of faith. It is a faith in which mind and matter entwine, yet it is anchored in the empirical precepts of science. It is a belief system that says directed consciousness can promote spontaneous remission of a life-threatening disease, a personal quantum leap. It embraces a worldview wherein quantum leaps do occur, not just in the atomic and subatomic domain but in human existence itself— be it in the unfolding of an individual life, in a societal change, or in a country’s struggle for freedom.
I will not ask you to accept that view “on faith.” Let me offer a proof of it by way of my own life, starting at the point when I was the least certain of its meaning and value.
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