Prologue

‘Ae dil hai mushkil jeena yahan,

Zara hat ke, zara bach ke

Ye hai Bombay meri jaan . . .’

—C.I.D. ¹

It was 9 p.m. on a Friday night at PrimeOne Towers in Lower Parel, Mumbai. The twenty-fifth floor housed the offices of CerysIn, one of India’s largest fast-moving consumer goods (FMCG) companies. The office was nearly empty, and the security guard at the desk was catching his daily dose of news and outrage. One of the cabins was occupied. ‘Why does she work so late? It’s a Friday night; does she have no social life?’ Arpita, an intern, asked her colleague, Aman. Arpita, new to CerysIn, did not know who was in the sole lit cabin on the twenty-fifth floor. ‘Dude, that’s Akanksha Sharma, senior vice-president of personal care products. If she’s not here on a Friday night, our sales would be hit!’ Aman was only half-joking. Akanksha was a legend. Twenty years into her job—her first and only job so far—she had been instrumental in the company beating the stock market’s expectations every quarter.

In her cabin, Akanksha was staring at the latest monthly volumes, and they made for grim reading. ‘Madam, kya karega (what to do)? That new foreign company, Deknext, has doubled the commission for me and is even offering me incentives! I couldn’t say no, I have a family to support,’ a CerysIn dealer had confided just last week. Deknext had made inroads into CerysIn’s market. Akanksha had done nothing about this until now because CerysIn’s products were far superior and she knew most of the company’s large dealers on a first-name basis. But now CerysIn’s market share was under threat. ‘You need to crack this one, Akanksha, and I know you will. This is small beer for you,’ Mukul Gupta, CerysIn’s executive director, personal products, and Akanksha’s boss, had told her. What Mukul didn’t know was that Akanksha was under real pressure this time and not because of Deknext; the stress from other areas of her life refused to go.

With bleary eyes, Akanksha glanced into her inbox and read the invite. ‘Manish and Smriti invite you to Arya’s eighth birthday!’ Manish and Smriti were a young couple who stayed as tenants in the apartment complex where Akanksha owned a four-bedroom apartment. Arya and Ria—Akanksha’s daughter—were best friends. ‘How are you? Long time, let’s catch up soon?’ was the most common thing Akanksha heard from her friends, including Manish and Smriti. And her standard reply was ‘Sure, will try; travelling this week, but come over next Sunday?’ Next Sunday never came, and Akanksha’s friends knew that only too well.

Even as she stared at her sleek, top-of-the-line laptop, Akanksha’s iPhone chirped with a notification. Zoya had posted a new photo on her Instagram. Zoya was her best friend from school and a freelance consultant. ‘YOLO Akanksha, YOLO’ was what Zoya kept telling Akanksha—You Only Live Once. Zoya was at Ko Samui enjoying the sunset while smoking a cigarette and sipping a cosmopolitan. ‘I don’t have a huge flat and a big bank balance, but hey, I am the master of my time!’ Zoya had told her when they last met six months ago at a school reunion.

Zoya had recently got a divorce after fifteen years of marriage. ‘I couldn’t take it any more yaar, seriously, I gave it my best,’ Zoya had told her then, and Akanksha recalled how guilty she had felt for not being there for her friend. India had among the lowest divorce rates in the world but Akanksha was a numbers person. She knew that the low rate was an optical illusion, a meaningless statistic. She recalled a BBC article which said, ‘The number of people separated is almost thrice the number of people divorced . . . More women are divorced and separated than men.’ ² And then there was the stark reality of living in a metro city such as Mumbai, where, she recalled from a newspaper article, divorce rates are heading towards 40 per cent. ³ So she knew that the low rate of divorce at an all-India level was meaningless. Society didn’t take a woman divorcing her husband well. Her mother once told her, ‘Duniya main sabse bada rog, kya kahenge log?’ ⁴

Akanksha’s own marriage wasn’t exactly a prized possession. ‘Beta, why don’t you spend more time at home?’ her mother-in-law kept telling her. ‘Ma, why can’t you make kheer like Dadi?’ Ria had once told her. ‘Why can’t you take more days off? Work is going bonkers; you know how it is,’ Akash, her husband, told her. Akash had recently been promoted to the position of CEO of one of India’s largest mobile operators, and the pressure on him had only increased. The previous CEO was booted out after he failed to respond adequately to a massive price war triggered by a rival. It was now Akash’s job to recover the lost market share in a ruthlessly competitive market.

Compared to Akash, Akanksha had been more successful in her career. ‘Just keep doing your job, Akanksha; I can assure you that you will succeed me as the head of the personal care products division one day,’ Mukul had told her just last week. But Akanksha’s success wasn’t celebrated at home; it was envied. Zoya had once told her, ‘Akash has an inferiority complex; just face it. When we women outperform Indian men in the working environment, they feel increasingly insecure. Indian men have never been trained to accept women as bosses at their workplace, and even at home, husbands and their mothers still expect housewives.’

Akanksha’s head and heart were heavy as she finally left the office at 10 p.m. ‘It’s showing now; you’ve got bags under your eyes and you’ve got dark circles. Your designer clothes can’t hide your emptiness inside forever, Akanksha; you need help,’ Zoya had told her many months ago. After all the hard work, all the success at her job, her stellar reputation among her clients and her friends, Akanksha still felt an emptiness. She looked through her purse and found the number of a counsellor and psychologist that Zoya had given her. It was time to get professional help.

Twenty kilometres north of Akanksha’s housing complex, young Suraj Trivedi extricated himself out of a jam-packed ‘Virar fast’ Mumbai local at Kandivali station. ‘Super dense crush load’ is the technical term describing the high concentration of railway passengers that Suraj recalled reading. Suraj, who was twenty-seven years old and an IIT-IIM graduate, was a product of the best that Indian education has to offer. ‘Why are you choosing this small investment bank, bro? The best offers from Singapore to San Francisco are out there for you!’ his friends at IIM had told him. But Suraj wanted to work from the ground up with Vedanga Capital, a boutique investment bank located at the Bandra Kurla Complex in Mumbai, and wanted to stay back in India and close to his mother. As his batchmates left for plum, overseas jobs, Suraj stayed back convinced that the risk was worth it. The first week in Vedanga Capital smashed his hopes.

‘So listen, Suraj, you need to clean up client records for the compliance department. Cross-check client names, addresses from filings and tally them with what was entered by data entry operators into Excel files,’ Gaurav Lakhani, Suraj’s boss, told him in the first week of his job. ‘Dude, seriously? You’re an IIT-IIM grad; that’s not your job,’ Amit, his batchmate, had pinged him on WhatsApp. Amit was at Google’s headquarters in Mountain View, California and was very clear on the privileges of an IIT-IIM education.

Back to the reality of Mumbai, sitting in the autorickshaw from Kandivali station to his house and stuck at the signal, Suraj asked the driver, ‘Boss, kitna time (how much longer)?’ The driver replied, ‘Aadha ghanta, maalik; bridge bandh hai (Half an hour, chief; the bridge is closed).’

‘Find a house in Kandivali where the rent is low, and you can use the savings to build up a corpus,’ he had been advised by his friends. The rent was indeed lower compared to Bandra West, but the commute was tortuously longer—the classic trade-off of staying in Mumbai. And the commute had only increased—first because of the Metro construction work and now due to the closure of an unsafe bridge on S.V. Road. He gave a mirthless laugh remembering an old joke: ‘Mumbai meri jaan . . . lekar rahegi’ (‘Mumbai will eventually take my life’; the phrase ‘Mumbai meri jaan’ literally means, ‘Mumbai is my life’). The city’s pulverized infrastructure was getting to Suraj now.

‘You’ve put on so much weight, Suraj; signs of prosperity? Hehehe,’ Karan, his Wall Street friend, pinged him in the night, after seeing Suraj’s latest Facebook check-in. ‘You need to reduce weight. Your backache is a combination of bad posture, a sedentary lifestyle and increased weight,’ his orthopaedic doctor had told him. Suraj hadn’t visited the gym since he joined Vedanga Capital. Twelve hours at work and a two-hour commute left him with hardly any time to focus on working out. And his diet consisted of junk food ordered at odd hours. ‘The prosperity is only for Vedanga and my bosses; I’m only getting the extra weight. Things not good bro,’ Suraj replied to Karan.

‘Did you see this? Please do yoga, beta; take care of yourself,’ Suraj’s mom had forwarded him an article on India being the sixth most depressed country in the world. ⁵ ‘Thanks, Mom, that’s all I wanted,’ he told her. The stress was real. Just a few weeks ago, his IIM batch’s WhatsApp group was abuzz with the news of the suicide of a young associate at a multinational investment bank who had jumped off the Bandra-Worli Sea Link. Everyone was shocked by the incident for a few days but everything settled down soon. This was India; the race to a better life was brutal.

News was easy to come by since Suraj was completely obsessed with social media. ‘Cheap data, Suraj, cheap data—that’s the paradigm shift! India is among the top markets in the world for Internet—streaming, gaming and any damn thing online,’ Gaurav told him. On his other WhatsApp groups, Suraj’s close friends were sharing photos of their latest conquests—from late-night parties to holidays at Machu Picchu and corporate team-building trips in Las Vegas and Macau. ‘Bro, tu aaja, yaar, come over during your next holidays, and we’ll do a road trip on the West Coast. Karan is also coming over,’ Amit pinged him late at night. ‘Can’t do, bro; no holidays for at least six to nine months, have a packed deal-book and travel plan,’ Suraj replied to him. It was already 1 a.m., and Suraj had spent close to two hours on his phone on WhatsApp, Facebook and Instagram, and it was running out of battery. He lit a cigarette and took a deep drag. He began smoking when he was at IIT, but it had never become a habit, until now.

‘Suraj, you’ve got serious analytical skills, and we like your sales pitch’ was how his boss, Gaurav, and Vedanga Capital had roped him in during the placements. ‘This job will open doors for you; you’re going to meet a lot of important people. The network is yours to build,’ he had promised him. On the first day at his job, Gaurav told him, ‘Suraj, the world is yours; save aggressively, build your corpus and your network. If you want to become a start-up founder, every top venture capital firm will fund your start-up. In five years, you won’t recognize yourself.’ But at just five months into the job, Suraj could already not recognize himself. The grind had got to him; the peer pressure had got to him. His life was not going anywhere. He opened his smartphone and entered ‘Counsellor psychologist in Mumbai’ in the search box. It was time to seek help.

* * *

Akanksha and Suraj are fictional characters loosely based on people that we, the authors, have met. At various points in our own careers, we have also gone down similar paths. Things were not like this, our parents told us. But our parents lived in simpler times in a world of closed economies, government jobs, cocooned from the rest of the world, happy with 10 per cent increments and one-month bonuses. Their biggest dreams were to send their kids abroad and enjoy a retired life on government pensions in government colonies. T.V. Mohandas Pai, the former chief financial officer (CFO) of Infosys and current chairman of Manipal Global Education, tells us: ‘When I was growing up, we had a very simple life. We were happy with whatever we had—from a radio to a cycle to a company-owned car. We’d go to the library, read a book or read a comic. There was not much growth for us and no impetus to change. We had lower incomes and we didn’t know what more we could do as opportunities were scarce. The economy grew slowly! There wasn’t even a television to show us the world outside.’ ⁶

Nearly thirty years after India opened up its economy to the world, our lifestyles—and those of youngsters after us—have seen a sea change that makes our lives almost unrecognizable to our parents. The plus side is the immense wealth created and enjoyed as new sectors and new careers propelled us forwards. The minus side is the price we have paid in physical and mental health. India’s weak infrastructure, unable to cope with decades of rapid economic growth, has only added to the pressures. Our aspirations might be on a par with developed countries, but we are trying to fulfil those aspirations with gridlocked traffic, overflowing local trains and decrepit bridges. Pai says, ‘China invested in human capital to export to the world. They took the surpluses from that and put the money into improving infrastructure, improving the school and college networks. They incentivized heavy industry and so they went to a commanding position. We never put enough money into infrastructure. Now in India, human capital hasn’t grown much. The economy can grow at 8 per cent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) for a long time but employees simply can’t grow at that pace in their jobs and be more productive, and the infrastructure simply can’t keep up with the economy. As a result, the stress on their managers, on the C-Suite has gone up . . . All these things have resulted in the increased stress of urban living in India.’ ⁷

When our ambitions get shackled by the limitations of the world around us, we seek help to cope. And the Internet is at our service. In all probability, while you are reading this book, you have notifications for twelve unread emails, fifteen WhatsApp pings and sundry other alerts on your mobile clamouring for your attention. And then there is infotainment—everything from TED Talks to National Geographic documentaries, from books on pop psychology and behavioural finance to podcasts on history, science and politics.

Thanks to the Internet, we have easy access to enormous amounts of wisdom and—remarkably enough—most of it can be accessed for free or at a nominal charge. And yet this cornucopia of knowledge flatters to deceive. As we show in the next chapter, psychologists and cognitive and behavioural scientists are now moving towards a view that our brains are experts at fooling us.

How does this cluttered mind affect us? For one, we lose focus and our attention span suffers. There is also the small matter that this diversity of material does not seem to be making us wiser or happier or less stressed. In fact, stress levels in India are: (a) higher compared to other countries; and (b) rising ever higher for the employed workforce.

What is the way out? In this book, we build a structure called the Simplicity Paradigm, whose foundation consists of three types of practices—specialize, simplify, and spiritualize (more on these in Chapters 2, 3 and 4 respectively). On top of this foundation, we propose three specific behaviours—clutter reduction, creativity and collaboration (refer to Chapters 5, 6 and 7 respectively). Each practice stands alone as a desired behaviour but in this book, we will also show how the foundation is connected to these practices and how without the foundation, the benefits of the practices would be temporary at best. Finally, we show you their applications and what is possible when you apply the foundation and practices in real life—simplicity in business and simplicity in investing (in Chapters 8 and 9 respectively). Finally, Chapter 10 pulls everything together to give you a Simplicity Checklist.

Each chapter ends with an interview with an expert who we believe exemplifies the core values from the chapter. We have drawn these experts from a wide array of fields because for all of us our lives aren’t just our jobs. The stories of these remarkable experts contain lessons for all of us.

The Simplicity Paradigm