Provoke some...

I am sorry. Did I confuse you? Are these not the same? Have you not mostly used the two words interchangeably? “Am I not healthy if I am fit?” Is that what you are thinking? So, tell me, are you fit or healthy or both? Recent news of Sourav Ganguli getting a cardiac arrest at a relatively young age of 48 has made people sit up and take notice. After all, he was an active sportsperson and endorsing Fortune Rice Bran ‘Health’ Oil 😊 (Do we really expect Ajay Devgan to eat Vimal Pan Masala or Aamir Khan to use Vivo mobile phones or Salman Khan to wear Rupa underwear or whichever brand he endorses?). A school friend, unfortunately, couldn’t survive and passed away a week shy of his 50 th birthday. Let’s get into a bit of details. How do people define fitness? Generally, being ‘fit’ is the ‘external’ look and feel. For men, it would mean having six packs, biceps, chiseled looks or a lean body. For women, it could be having a 36-24-36 figure (or whatever is the going dimension) or bein

Okay, so this Spanish bugger, Francesc Miralles, son of a dressmaker and an office clerk, with bad high-school records who worked as a waiter found his Ikigai of selling self-help crap to the gullible. The first line of the book says it all - “The book came into being on a rainy night in Tokyo, when its authors sat down together for the first time in one of the city’s tiny bars’. So basically Miralles and Hector Garcia, a Japanese software engineer were sloshed when they came up with this ‘brilliant’ idea of telling a story to the world about how this handful of people on the island of Okinawa live longer than the rest of the world. And boy, how the world has lapped up the utter nonsense by buying millions of copies of, yet another scam called ‘Ikigai’. In a nutshell, Ikigai is the intersection of: 1.         1. What you love 2.        2. What the world needs 3.        3. What you are good at 4.        4. What you can be paid for Obviously, the long-lost humans who continue

Fear… A word whose mere mention brings in more of it. You would have heard and read so many times that ‘Fear is our greatest enemy’ yet day after day, month after month, year after year, we keep nurturing it such that it starts festering our entire existence. Just so as to comfort you, fear has been mentioned in ALL, yes ALL, religious & spiritual tomes across the world since writing came in existence. So, you are not the first or the only human facing it. In fact, each and every human and every other living creature, fears something or the other. So, you can take a deep breath and relax since you are not all alone is this or you are facing some unique challenge that no one else has faced earlier or now. You must have also heard or read that the universe is ‘time’ & ‘space’. Have you wondered how? Your body occupies ‘space’ while your mind is always in ‘time’. Isn’t it? Your mind is either thinking about the ‘past’ or the ‘future’ which is nothing but time. Also, while t

You thought you knew it all. Isn’t it? You were sure about what you were doing and why. You knew what was ‘important’ and what wasn’t. You accepted the look and feel of the world. You kept resisting change till like a coil spring, change rebounded so dramatically that you are now living in a world you couldn’t have imagined even a month back. Not just illness, Coronavirus has brought with it STRESS, unanticipated both in terms of quantity and form. Let’s look at 7 things you can do to mitigate this unprecedented stress brought in by Coronavirus and the subsequent lockdown which has restricted you to your homes. 1.        STAY INFORMED To defeat the enemy, you need to know it well. Find out exactly what is Coronavirus and what can you do to keep it bay and eventually defeat. It is important though that you get your information from genuine sources and don’t believe in everything that you read or listen. In fact, your first reaction should be to ‘disbelieve’ everything that

Think of all the stories from the 80s/90s we tell (or hear) when a car (read Maruti) was considered a luxury or the only way most people saw an airplane was when it roaringly flew overhead. When the summer vacations meant nani ka ghar and eating out was maybe once a month and that too mostly chaat , idli-dosa or chowmein. When we played chhupam chhupai, ikkal dukkal, gitti phod, kanche and flew kites. When we spent most of the time at home with our families or when we physically visited people to meet them. When we bought new clothes only at Diwali / Eid / Christmas and if we were nice then for the birthday as well. When a camera roll could only snap 36 pics which even how hard we tried to carefully click would end up with 5-6 out of focus or over exposed. When the starting salaries, even for IIT / IIM graduates, were just Rs 5,000-10,000 a month. When buying a house to live in was the prime goal. When SENSEX was about 500 while most people invested their savings in FDs which d

Let's look at the origins of world's Top 10 most popular sports: Football - 1863 Cricket - 1877 Hockey - 1875 Tennis - 1873 Volleyball - 1895 Table Tennis - end of 1800s Basketball - 1891 Baseball - 1845 Rugby - 1823 Golf - 1764 Homosapiens have inhabited this planet since 200,000 years. Wonder what kind of evolution did the Human race go through between 1850 to 1900, a measly 50 years, when the Top 8 most popular games were invented? Even the modern Olympics commenced from 1894 coincidentally during the same 50 years. There are basically Three different types of sports viz team games (football, cricket, hockey, volleyball etc), individual games (tennis, table tennis etc) and field events (racing, swimming, gymnastics etc which predominantly take place during Olympics or similar world/continent events. Let's now look at what exactly happens when we play these games? In the Team games, there are two opposing teams (started off as countries) who fight over