Category: Features

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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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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