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    A Calmer You: Witty Tips to Beat Everyday Stress
    A Calmer You: Witty Tips to Beat Everyday Stress
    A Calmer You: Witty Tips to Beat Everyday Stress
    Ebook172 pages2 hours

    A Calmer You: Witty Tips to Beat Everyday Stress

    By Sonal Kalra

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    About this ebook

    In an easy and charming manner, Sonal Kalra helps us tackle the everyday irritants and stresses in life-be it the daily stresses relating to work and colleagues, traffic and road rage, etiquette or self-esteem, A Calmer You helps us put our priorities into perspective.
    Sonal’s calmness tips are seemingly simple and amazingly effective. Her insights and experiences are situations we can all relate to, and the wise and often hilarious characters-the serene Pappu Singh, the incorrigible Chaddha ji and the indefatigable Bubbly Aunty-peppered throughout this book offer surprising nuggets of wisdom.
    You will be left with techniques to achieve tranquility and composure in the face of aggravation, and that too, with a big smile on your face!
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWisdom Tree Publishers
    Release dateFeb 4, 2011
    ISBN9788183282253
    A Calmer You: Witty Tips to Beat Everyday Stress
    Author

    Sonal Kalra

    Sonal Kalra is a journalist-author, who presently heads HT City, the Entertainment, Art and Lifestyle supplement of India's leading national daily, Hindustan Times. Her popular Sunday column, A Calmer You, was first compiled into a bestselling book by the same name in 2010. A gold medallist alumna of the Indian Institute of Mass Communication, New Delhi, she is the recipient of several prestigious awards including the Dr Sarvapalli Radhakrishnan Rashtriya Samman for excellence in journalism in 2011, and the noted Ramnath Goenka Award, considered the Oscars of journalism in India, in 2012.

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      Book preview

      A Calmer You - Sonal Kalra

      life.

      Relation-trips

      1

      Life in circles

      The biggest stresses in life can be tackled with the smallest of solutions— just get your priorities right.

      I have always been a big believer of the fact that the more seemingly complicated a problem is, the simpler is its solution. Which also means that sometimes while we look towards gyaan gurus and ‘wise’ souls to help us achieve peace and calmness, it is possible that someone obscure and ‘unintelligent’ may end up giving us the most significant lessons in life. Let me tell you about one such person who, in the past few months, has become my ‘calmness guru’ just because of the attitude he sports towards life.

      His name is Pappu Singh and he runs a dhaba near my place. Not a restaurant—a humble dhaba with a few plastic chairs, where most of those who frequent keep sitting in their cars parked on the roadside and Chhottu, Pappu Singh’s executive assistant, efficiently runs around handing them their butter chicken and chicken tikka. Now if you have ever been to some such roadside ‘chicken corner’, you would know that this business thrives only towards the late hours of the evening (read night). One day while returning home quite late after a marathon meeting, I decided to stop by and get some dinner packed from Pappu’s dhaba. To my utter surprise, Pappu Singh had called it a night . . . at 9:30 PM and was already counting the collection for the evening when I reached. ‘What happened? Is everything alright? Why are you closed so early?’ I asked him, sorely disappointed at having to look for another place to get my kebabs. ‘Nothing wrong Madam ji,’ replied Pappu Singh good naturedly and went on to say that from that month, he had changed the timings of his dhaba—to close down at 9 PM sharp every evening. But why, I asked, reminding him that he could lose a lot of business as others are open till well after midnight. ‘Good luck to them Madam ji. By God’s grace, I make enough money working till 9 PM.’ But surely he wants to make more, I prodded. And then he told me something I’ll never forget all my life.

      ‘There’s no end to what we want Madam. And in our hurry to get more and more, we forget to see what we are giving up in return. My son is seven-years-old now. Last week I realised that for the past many years, I’ve never reached home in the evening at a time when he’s awake. He sleeps off early as he has school in the morning. I am working so hard so that I can have a quality life with my family. But I realised that I had no life at all. In working till so late, I was sacrificing the very same thing for which I was working in the first place. If I had continued like this, by the time I would realise that it’s time to slow down, my children would have grown up and would have no time for me.’ Hmmm . . . Pappu Singh is a simple man. He didn’t say anything that I didn’t already know. We keep reading stuff in books and magazines about how it is important to give time to family, no matter how busy our work lives are. But I wonder if we do anything about it after we flip the page over. In our bid to outdo each other in this world of cut-throat competition, we are subconsciously accumulating stress and guilt inside us, being fully well aware that we aren’t leading the balanced life we should.

      My calmness tip is that we should see life as a set of concentric circles . . . something like what you have on dartboards. Place yourself in the innermost dot, as your first responsibility is towards your own self—your physical and mental health. If that is not in order, nothing good can happen anyway. Then comes the first circle from inside, which ought to be your loved ones or your immediate family—the people who would love you the same, whether you are able to do anything for them or not. Then comes the next circle which is your extended family and close friends . . . and so on. You will realise that work colleagues and acquaintances come in a much outer circle as compared to your own family—your parents or spouse and kids. The way you lead your daily life must always be decided in a way that your priorities move outwards from the innermost circle. If there’s ever a conflict, the inner circle wins. Once we achieve this clarity in life, we wouldn’t find it tough to set our priorities right in life. Remember that if something happened to you, the organisation you work day and night for would take a week at the most, to find a replacement for you. But the same family that you have been neglecting for that work is the one that’ll stick with you, till your last breath. Think about it.

      Sonal Kalra has her priorities laid out clearly in life. In the innermost circle lies chocolates. No, books. No, chocolates . . . okay both.

      2

      Make your peace

      Why do we like to hold grudges, when all that it does is spoil our peace— and health?

      Flashback 1989. There was a wedding in my family, which, like any other big fat Punjabi wedding, had the entire clan, including the cousins of the cousins, and then their cousins attending it. And like any other typical Indian wedding, the function saw its share of ego hassles too. Bubbly Aunty was hugely upset that as a baraati or a ‘respected’ guest from the groom’s side, she wasn’t offered due respect by the bride’s parents. Cut to circa 2009. Popping pills for hypertension, this is what Bubbly Aunty, twenty years older and not an iota wiser, had to say, ‘I can’t forget the insult of that evening. Let my granddaughter get married, and I’ll repay with a royal ignore to those who didn’t treat me well.’ Hmm, twenty years didn’t do anything to a negative feeling she decided to nurse, no wonder she has ulcers of three different kinds along with an array of ailments.

      Let’s accept the truth, we are a nation who likes to hold grudges, no matter what it costs our health. And why, the tendency is not limited to just us ordinary mortals, half of the Indian film industry holds a grudge that they weren’t invited to a biggie wedding even after two years have passed. Politicians hold a royal grudge when they aren’t invited to key ‘tea parties’ (though that’s one grudge they learn to forget when it’s horse trading time!). Probed deeply, almost all of us would have stories of tell of when and how we were wronged. The fact that the grudge is sitting inside us, eating our peace away and not that of the ones who wronged us doesn’t occur to most though.

      Let’s try and see it in a simple way. Hold a glass of water for a second and keep it down. Did you feel anything? . . . nope. Now hold that same glass of water with your arm stretched for over an hour. Does it hurt? You bet it does. The weight of the glass hasn’t changed, it is how and for how long do you hold it that makes all the difference. We can keep holding a bitter grudge for a lifetime, but remember that it will still not take us back into the past and change the situation that hurt us in the first place.

      Calmness is waiting for you to forgive and let go. I know in this world of injustice, it’s easy to sermonise and ask you to keep forgiving and forgetting but believe me, if you manage to take even a few steps in that direction, it’s only going to help you and your health. Make your peace with whatever wrong you had to suffer in the past and see the difference. Just let it go!

      Sonal Kalra hosted a ‘no more grudges’ party last week and invited ‘almost’ all her friends, except Tanya who didn’t invite her to a party she threw last month!!

      3

      Right or happy?

      Did you know the term ‘mother-in-law stress’ fetches a whopping 8,00,000 results when googled?

      9:30 AM and Riya was still asleep. Sumita, her mother, made a face, banged the door and shouted, ‘It’s not good to sleep till so late.’

      If I ask you to comment on the above para, you’d probably say, ‘What’s there to comment? It’s perfectly normal. If a mother won’t lovingly scold, who will? Now replace the word ‘mother’ with ‘mother-in-law’ and read it again. Suddenly, you’ll visualise the situation rather negatively. Depending on your age, you would either side up with the mother-in-law or label her as an unreasonable dictator.

      If you’re wondering why I am suddenly talking about mothers-in-law instead of sharing calmness tricks, the reason again is our very own Pappu Singh. By the way, Pappu Singh is becoming a threat to me by the week. A lot of fans (please let me use the term instead of ‘readers’, it’s just so more glam) of this column have started addressing their letters to him instead of me. Well he’s cool but don’t be under the impression that he’s immune to stress. Just the other day he was sitting with his head in his hands. When asked he said, ‘Kya karein Madam, sab tension chhotti, bas biwi aur maa ke jhagde ki tension moti’ (all other forms of tension are insignificant in front of the stress caused by a fight between wife and mother). So now you see where I am coming

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