Bear your Cross with pride.

The other day, while wading through a plethora of gifts bestowed on us on various occasions and stored away in our steel cupboard, I came across a Cross Select Tip Rolling Ball Pen with a rich brown enameled body, rather handsomely boxed. As I took it out to admire it, it triggered a memory. I’m backtracking to the late seventies and early eighties. I was working in Everest Advertising as a writer and enjoying a rather long spell of success. http://digbig.com/4yqay. This agency was run on feudal lines with many fiefdoms operating under an overlord. From time to time, durbar used to be held and favours bestowed on the deserving underlings among whom I happened to figure. One Diwali, I was among the select coterie to receive from the Overlord’s second-in-command under the benign gaze of the King-Emperor a golden Cross Ball Pen, a much coveted status symbols for executives. I was quite thrilled to get it although I did most of my writing on a typewriter. http://digbig.com/4yqba. Being absent-minded, I managed to lose my Cross soon enough and was much castigated by friends, well-wishers and associates for being so careless and uncaring.

Every day in every way.

Self-improvement manuals. Would you believe I used to be an avid reader of these DIY tomes – why, you could say almost a junkie – once upon a time? I kid you not. I read Dale Carnegie’s How To Make Friends and Influence People and Norman Vincent Peale’s Power of Positive Thinking at the impressionable age of twelve or so. I chanced upon both in a cupboard full of books we used to have. Both, if memory serves, were DB Taraporewala’s trade paperbacks. (I can even ‘see’ the rather unfriendly yellow cover with black printing of the How To book.) Being an introvert by nature, it didn’t take me long to believe that these guys really knew the inside secrets of success and happiness. This belief persisted most of my earlier life. I got hooked on to scouring for, buying and studying many more of their brethren. I remember reading Vernon Howard’s Psycho-Pictography. His ‘teachings’ were couched in an esoteric pseudo-mystical lingo. He used parables (called 'Mental Pictures'), I suppose, of his own making. His USP was that by merely reading those gems, the reader’s sub-conscious would automatically and effortlessly absorb the teaching. The catch was that it would work for you only if you let it. (can you believe 'placebo' remedy?) How this proviso could co-exist with the earlier claim of the mind “automatically and effortlessly” absorbing the teaching I simply couldn’t figure out. Anyway, this ‘lift karadey’ stuff didn’t work for me and somewhere along the way I handed over my entire DIY tome collection to an acquaintance who actually believed it could be done – without mirrors. Read a ‘psycho-pictograph’ at http://www.anewlife.org/html/book_quotes.html#PP if you're so inclined.