Let Me Hijack Your Mind , livre ebook

ALYQUE PADAMSEE with VANDANA SAXENA PORIA

LET ME HIJACK YOUR MIND
Restart Your Life With Freedom
PENGUIN BOOKS

PENGUIN BOOKS
Contents
A Note from Alyque
Introduction by Ronnie Screwvala
PART 1: HIJACK!
1. I Would Never Sleep with a Stranger . . . Unless It Was My Husband
2. A Union of Taxpayers Who Refuse to Pay Tax
3. Do You Need a Licence to Marry Your Partner?
4. Ten for Men (and Zero for Everyone Else)
5. Make Way for the C?O instead of the CEO
6. Change the Battlefield: Selling the Truth
7. School versus Edutainment
8. Repaying the Accident of Birth: Bonus Babies
9. Why Are Terrorists Breaking the Law of Their Very Own Holy Book?
10. I Speak to God Every Night. Pity You Can t
PART II: RESTART!
11. Speaking the Unspoken Dialogues
12. My One Thousand Best Friends
13. Smart Alyque s Tips, Tricks and Tools for a Hijacked Life
14. The New Ten Commandments
15. Hacking Your Life: Key Messages and Bigger Questions from Each Chapter
Afterword by Vandana Saxena Poria
Notes
Acknowledgements
Follow Penguin
Copyright
Dedicated to my favourite people The Youth of India
A Note from Alyque
As you have gone through life so far, have you sometimes found yourself stuck in a rut? Or have you ever felt like a hamster on a wheel, going round and round following the pressures of society and your peers?
At work, do you ever find your bosses or customers to be micro-managing and controlling? Do see people around you consistently looking to get one step ahead in the rat race of life? Do you ever feel constrained by this? Are you wondering if this is all life is about?
Then this is the book for you!
It all starts with your mind and these thoughts that you are having. Have you noticed that most people are thinking, and therefore living, with one foot in the past, regurgitating old, outdated ways of doing things?
My aim is to get people out of the stuffy thinking that is causing their brains to stagnate.
It is time to allow yourself to be HIJACKED and RESTART your thinking process. By getting you to question what exactly keeps you stuck in that rut or on that hamster wheel: the social norms that we have come to accept as gospel.
I am not saying what I ve written in this book is the truth-it s my opinion. It s time you thought about why you follow the norms that you do.
This is a book designed to throw you all off balance in a good way, because it is crammed with ideas and fresh ways of thinking about how to live, how to dream and how to relook completely at your mindset and attitudes! As an advertising guru and thespian, my adventures in Idea-land have thrown up new concepts like the marriage licence . . . a fatwah against terrorists . . . bonus babies . . . and a myriad other concepts in revolutionary thinking.
My aim is for you to be stimulated. Throughout this book, I want you to shout out, Hey, I never looked at it like that!
The aim of this book is to get your heart and mind reignited by blowing away all the norms that history is forcing on you along with the old ways of doing things. In this fast-moving environment, whether at work or at home, you need to be thinking differently and acting quickly to take advantage of opportunities. This book will give you the mental muscle to look at the world differently and, through the RESTART section, build the world that we deserve to live in instead of wallowing in the one we ve got. At the same time, you will become leaders, creating a vibrant workplace that is future looking, despite the challenges that may come your way. This can only be done if mindsets change.
Through a new matrix I have invented-OICA (Observation, Insight, Concept, Actualization)-you can change negative thinking into positive action, and you can literally solve any problem by rephrasing the question! You will soon find yourself rejecting the most basic things that made you unhappy and coming up with new dynamic answers to questions like:
Why inherit your father s religion?
Why are multinational companies obsessed with GNP (gross national product) instead of GNH (gross national happiness)?
Why should marriage be til death do us part ?
Why are terrorists breaking the law of their very own holy books?
The book interweaves insights from my life to help others question the unquestioned. I want to take you on a journey to understand that life is holistic and integrated in the same way that nature is. This book invites you to question the way you live your life and what you consider success . Is life a wonderful gift which we have been misusing? Through my unique thought processes, I m asserting that people are worshipping false gods (money, religion, marriage etc.). I want to plant different seeds in your head to get you to decondition yourself and create a new paradigm of living-one that is daringly different from old-world values:
Lead a fuller life at work as well as at home-observing, feeling and learning all the time.
Come up with new ideas and spot new opportunities.
Be constantly engaged and involved! Take action where you are unhappy by recognizing what rules are making you unhappy.
Build new value systems based on principles and proverbs that lead to greater understanding and collaboration.
Grow business as nature grows: with violent happiness.
This book is a way to open windows in your mind, to think about life aside from greed, power and money. It is also a way to repay your fortunate accident of birth by helping the less fortunate.
It is ideal for anyone who is restless and believes there is more to life. For anyone in the process of building their career and wanting to bring innovation around them. And most of all for anyone who is determined to leave humanity in a better shape than what they were born into. As Einstein says, We cannot solve our problems with the same thinking we used when we created them. So why not have fun discovering new ways of thinking the AP way?
Now tell me, are you ready to let me HIJACK YOUR MIND?
Introduction
Ronnie Screwvala
Co-founder, UpGrad; Founder, UTV Group
In this book, Alyque Padamsee is doing what he does best: provoke you.
In my opinion, Alyque Padamsee was one of India s greatest non-linear thinkers. The Brandfather of advertising and the father of theatre in India, Alyque s passing shook us all. Yet, few of us experienced the extent of another dimension of Alyque. And that is what this book is about.
Alyque was all about living with violent happiness, throughout his life, in whatever he did. You ll hear many from the theatre and business fraternity, including me, describe him as someone who always helped you maximize your potential and be your best. When people are at their best, Alyque says they become joyful, confident and curious. The result? It doesn t just improve life for them, it also improves life for everybody around them, creating happier societies.
But there s a huge part of the population that is not joyful. That are mentally still in chains. That believe they have to struggle with life and can t do anything about this.
Not one to allow this to happen, Alyque set out to create a guide for commandeering your mind and helping you realize what your own subconscious chains are.
What are those chains?
Through this book, Alyque delves deeply into entrenched social norms that most of us have subconsciously been hostage to and that bring unhappiness into our lives. He then turns our problems of unhappiness on their heads and forces us to examine their root causes again. He asks us whether it still needs to be like this or can we now give up these ghosts of the past that live on our shoulders, weighing us down? And he does this entertainingly, bringing in anecdotes from his incredible experience gained through seventy-seven theatre productions and over half a century in advertising, but also his long-lasting work through another side of his life.
Why does he feel the need to provoke?
India s secular fabric, composite culture, and pluralism were values that Alyque held dear. He felt that India (and the rest of the world) was a very unfair place, and many marginal voices have gone unheard due to the silence of those who did not speak up, that too for centuries. He was concerned about how religion was tearing apart the world, governments were not doing their job and the general brainwashing that went on in what is considered news . He felt it was causing the vast majority of the population to feel trapped, be unhappy, doubt themselves and accept the situation like victims. But they weren t trapped, and he felt his last job on this planet was to provoke them into action. Because their lives and, more importantly, billions of other people s lives depended on it.
For decades, Alyque had worked relentlessly on improving society in whatever ways he could, be it working with the government during the 1992 Mumbai riots (at great risk to himself), or with Dalits on untouchability or supporting movements for justice and peace. His public service adverts were legendary, from tomatoes squashed in a jar to represent having too many kids, to coconuts being smashed to represent what happens if you don t wear a helmet. He was ingenious at creating and visualizing stories that haunted you and slowly changed your thinking.
This book is his final way of helping you change your thinking so you too can live with violent happiness and, at the same time, bring up those who are less fortunate than you.
There is no more important time than now to find a way to maximize the potential of everyone around us. With climate change and an increasingly VUCA 1 world, we need it more than ever!
But how exactly do we maximize this potential of everyone around us?
It all starts with your mindset-it is time to cast off those imaginary shackles of the past, to put those OLD ways of thinking to sleep, forever. It is time for you to question everything, from your religion to the way you work, the way