If I had an E

Who moved my cheese?
In a world that's fast discovering that the only thing that's permanent is change, little wonder that every kind of book that holds out any kind of promise on managing change is perfect bait on the bookshelf. I normally walk past bookshelves anywhere in the world deftly avoiding the clasping clutching grasping cajoling grabbing, flirting come-hither vibes sent out by books like that. I can proudly say that I haven't sipped no chicken soup and I've Just Said No to every johnny wanting to help me up 7 or 9 or 20 steps to effective something or the other. And when they send me publicity stuff in the mail, I save the nice coloured paper clip and throw away the rest. Sometimes I keep the envelope to store seeds, so that my conservationist friends are suitably impressed. If the publicity material is colourful enough, it goes to friends with kids always looking for Glossy Pictures for Projects.
I am that kind of non-pushover customer, I would like to think. And yet.
And yet I was drawn into the latest mouse-trap - I reached for the Cheese, and snappp it shut down on my hand, inflicting a Rs 95 wound. It was all over the place, this Who Moved My Cheese, and suddenly there I was in a bookstore opposite my dentist, with the prospect of waiting in a room with nothing but news magazines dating circa 1991. And so I bought this slim little thing, that promised to be the One Story that could Change the way you dealt with Change. A one-size fits-all kind of thing. What I expected was, at the very least, something like a neat little Zen story, offering you a 'satori' for all occasions - the mental equivalent of a thumb to suck when in corporate or emotional or familial distress arising from Change.
What I got instead was a feeling of being had. What is worse, I think, is that it isn't just your money that is thrilling the writer (though that helps) - it is the genuine belief that he's got something very very important to share with us and that his little book will make a huge difference to mankind.
First, let's get the rather slim story of this anorexic 95-pager out of the way. Four creatures - 2 mouse-like and 2 human-like, live in a maze, look for cheese (read wealth/work/health/happiness ), and find it. The mouse types, using their natural instincts, enjoy the cheese but still remain prepared for the fact that stocks may run-out, and are hence flexible, and able to find more when this cheese is over. The human types, with the hubris of their species, simply keep eating the cheese, assuming there is an unending supply, and are ill-equipped to look for more after the supply runs out. "Who moved my cheese?" they whine. One of them manages to pull himself together and learn all the right things to survive - be flexible, learn from your mistakes, trust your instincts, accept change, move on. In the interest of others who follow him, he even writes some of his terribly deep discoveries on the walls of the maze - turning into some kind of Pop Prophet or Messiah of the Maze or Cheeze Chanakya.
That’s it. And now that I read the paragraph above, I realize I have put it more succinctly and interestingly than the book. So give me Rs 95. Oh well, ok, Rs 47.50 will do.
The first 20 pages of the book are devoted to telling you how useful the book is going to be. It's a kind of extended back-of-the-book endorsement blurb, that simply takes up almost one-fourths of the book. Nice trick. As you wade through this, you have the urge to whine: "Who took my Rs 95?" And worse, in the recession-reeling US you would sqwak: "Who took my US$ 20?"
The story itself is written in that bugging parable-like over-simplified way. Which works for a real parable, but not for a pretend-parable. Ends up sounding so wannabe Eastern-philosophy. (The same effect as when one sees a big Caucasian woman in salwar kameez, kolhapuri chappals, zillion silver bangles, nose ring and gajra in hair ambling down Janpath.) Why does the child-like simplicity of language work in a real parable or in a Zen story? Because the very nature of the material is simple and deep, and assumes that the reader has the readiness or the potential to absorb the slow-release larger meaning of the story. While our Cheese story here is just simple-minded and shallow, and assumes that its reader is thick in the head, brought up only on a diet of nasty-nasty, competitive, old-fashioned Western management precepts. Maybe many are, and hence the huge success of the book. Or then maybe, as one friend suggests, besides the marketing hype that helps, each book is born with its own fate, and this one is lucky as hell, that's all.
All this said, I would now like to share with you a story, that really and truly, to my mind, has the potential of holding a very important lesson out to anyone who hears it. After reading Cheese, I though I should have very long back written this incident up into a pretend-parable, complete with endorsements and marketing hoopla, etc. But being truly Eastern and truly unambitious and uninterested in reaching for your wallet, I will share it free. Totally free. (Anyone wanting to buy the rights for a movie and for the dolls and for the board game and for the sequel, and for my lecture tour: meet my agent and come loaded.)
Jokes aside. It is a rather rather nice and illustrative story. I call it: "If I had an E"
Some years ago, a friend of mine and I sat playing Scrabble. We didn't bother to use a timer, going broadly by a sense of time. It was her turn to play, and she was taking very very very long over her word. Once in a while she would pick up a few tiles as if to make a word, and then put them back on her stand with a no-nod. For a while I thought she had and awful bunch of letters. Then I thought she had a terrific bunch and was very close to using them all up in one go. Then I thought she had the dread Q. Then I thought she was figuring how to use the Triple word place - in short, that she was really trying to optimize her resources and yet not block up opportunities for me, etc. About 45 minutes down the road, after I had made coffee, drunk it, attended a phone call, asked her a couple of times if she was going to slay me with something big….I lost my patience and shouted: "Anjaliiii make your word naaaaa." She looked up at me very sadly, musingly, and said in a dreamy, regret-filled voice: "If I had an E, I could have made a killling." I squawked, I choked, I gaped. I said: "You mean you have spent all the time available to you, and more, and a decent bunch of letters, in idle thoughts about what you SHOULD have got and what you COULD have made, what you CAN'T do because you don’t have an E?? Damn." She looked up at me and came out of her dreamy regretful, wishful daze and realized the mad waste of it all. We both fell about laughing, particularly since the moral-of-the-story hit us very hard. That most of us spend most of our lives sulking: "If I had an E". While the resources staring up at us, the ones your Maker has dealt you, and the entire Universe of Triple word scores, and Double word scores, simply sit there unused and unappreciated, till one day the Big Score Board in the Sky rings up the final numbers and you're gone.
Now give me Rs 95. Or better still, US$ 20.