SIMPLIFY! AMPLIFY!

Published in the Sunday Vijay Karnataka on 28 July, 2024

A few days back, I happened to visit Neil and Heta. Our eldest son and daughter-in-law. In our house kids and I have set a rule. After marriage, children should live separately. You enjoy your life and we ours. Otherwise, we are there for each other. As Indian parents, we felt quite guilty when Neil moved away. It was in that guilt that we asked our youngest son, Raj, 'What do you think, should we live together or separately? Without being in two minds he answered in one sentence, 'Mom, we shouldn’t live together.' It has been two years now and we couldn’t agree more with the fact that we took the right decision. This one decision of ours made life easier. Where is the time to debate 'why did you say that' and 'why did he do that'? How much ever life we have been blessed with, let’s live it happily. Let's simplify things as much as possible. And for this very reason a lot of time and energy wasted on futile banter could be saved, which in turn could be used for good work by us. Anyway, we paid a visit to Neil Heta. After a lot of chat, Heta said, 'Mom you must see this, we organized remotes. In the bedroom, there always remained a question whether to keep the TV remote, sound system remote, Apple remote on my side or Neil's side. If you ever felt to play music, the remote happened to be exactly on the other side. We decided to find a solution on this matter and then placed all the remotes in the middle of the bed. We found this solution on Amazon. 'Wow! How nice it is! I didn't express my emotions but was very happy within. It was a very good habit to work out solutions for the smallest of things in life with each other's help and consultation. Such small solutions added to the grandness of joy.

People have done different things to save time spent on unnecessary discussion and used the same for good work. Albert Einstein always wore the same colour, same type of clothes. His question was, ``Why Make it complicated?'' He preferred grey colour suit, leather jacket, shoes without socks throughout his life and kept himself free from the stress of deciding ‘what to wear’ every day. Of course, he had many sets of the same type of clothes. Steve Jobs styled a black turtle neck t-shirt with the Apple logo and blue jeans by Japanese fashion designer Ise Miyake. He said, 'What to wear today? I saved the time going into this decision, used it for other things and saved myself from the decision fatigue. As you know, this dress of Steve Jobs became popular and iconic in the world. Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook or now Meta, followed in the footsteps of Steve Jobs. He also wore a grey t-shirt, jeans and sneakers. His dress was designed by Italian designer Brunello Cuccinelli. According to Mark Zuckerberg, he preferred a single dress because he wanted to focus his energy on other important tasks. These stalwarts got their dresses designed by designers so others could not copy their style. Apple's present CEO Tim Cook eats chicken, rice & salad every day. He also said the same, ‘why waste so much time in choosing what to eat every day?’ How deeply these great people think. Save time. Try to reduce stress. We should also introspect on such wasted time.

I did a lot of shopping for clothes during my tour of USA and Japan last year. Given a chance, I am a complete shopaholic. When I returned home from my trip to Japan, I drowned myself in guilt of, ‘why did I shop so much?’ There was no need, just because at some places clothes were cheaper, just for the sake of style, or even at times, just because I merely liked it, I had turned into a hoarder on this shopping spree, when actually there was no need of buying them. What happened later on is, the clothes could not be returned after our trip to the USA and Japan. So what should we do to repent for this thoughtless action, reckless shopping? I firmly decided not to shop for clothes for the next two and a half years. That is, till September 2025. According to Sudhir, instead of taking such extreme decisions, I was ought to make it a habit to take thoughtful decisions every time. Anyway, he just got an opportunity to scold me. After making this decision, I travelled the world for a hundred days but never purchased clothes. The stress of wandering aimlessly in the mall is over. Shopping anxiety got eliminated. That made the journey meaningful. In terms of shopping, our Raj was the reason for taking this extreme decision. While Sunila and I were shopping in the US, I used to persuade to Raj, 'Hey, purchase something for yourself' and in return he would say, 'I don't want anything.' I don't need it!' 'Buy a good car for yourself'. But he didn't buy the car until he had a job. After resuming his job, he purchased a simple car, the loan of which he’ll be able to pay from his salary. 'Raj, do you need money?' 'No mom, now I am employed.' Now we have a new stress, not because the children are demanding money, but because they do not want it from us. Raj says 'I don't want things unnecessarily'. In a shared apartment, his room has a bed to rest, a desk to work on and a TV in front of him. ‘Don't bring anything extra’, it’s like we are unlearning and learning new things from our children now. And that's good. Perhaps from that learning or Einstein's inspiration, I remembered the occasion of buying our new car. As our previous car was 10 years old, we thought of buying a new car because our old car was demanding more maintenance expenditure on it. We visited the showroom and within half an hour we stepped out after booking the next version of the same car in the same colour. We freed ourselves from visiting and searching ten showrooms, spending hours online watching car reviews and podcasts.

Marie Kondo and many others like her made themselves millionaires by clearing cluttered homes, ridding Americans of the obsession with ‘sale’ and solving the ‘Problem of Plenty’. Americans will be out of this madness but we Indians have begun to drench ourselves in the new sea of ​​online shopping. We should examine how many boxes of these online shopping items arrive in most of our homes every day. We should think, do we really need so many things? Earlier, did we really purchase as many things from the market? During the pandemic we got addicted to online shopping. One day we got nausea on watching the things coming to our house. It has to stop somewhere. Then we decided that the person who wanted to order a certain item, should put it in the online shopping cart, another person should check it and the third person should re-check it while paying. Do We Really Need This? Can we detach ourselves from this? Ask these questions and purchase the item after everyone has agreed. Gradually the number of incoming boxes began reducing. Stress got reduced. We played our part in reducing the environmental impact of those boxes, reducing the amount of waste that left our homes.

I happened to stay at my aunt Kamal Save’s place in Bordi during the two years of 8^th and 9^th grades of school. During those days, we used to visit the nearby tribal village. I can still clearly remember and visualise their houses. Small mud houses covered with cow dung. Just a handful of utensils arranged on planks, thin beds and satranji or mats on one side, and fine Warli paintings on those mud walls. These happy homes clearly showed that it doesn’t really take much for a home to be happy and families to be content. We keep adding stuff in the house and then we get stressed.

At present, I am stressed because of a number of remotes at my home. It is good that we did not add much automation, otherwise there would have been a lot of remotes for lights, remotes for fans, remotes for TVs, remotes for speakers, and remotes for curtains, glasses and windows. Homes of the past used to be good. On pressing a button, the fan began rotating, when a tube light was on, entire home was covered with brightness. Now we put so many lights that we don't really get as much light as we need or want. This is how things add on to our stress. Sometimes it feels like, with us taking all these ‘no-stress’ decisions, life might turn completely boring over the time.
Over simplification is also annoying. So this battle of ‘to be or not to be’ will continue but the important thing is that we should at least be aware of what is good and what is bad. So let's make as many thoughtful decisions as possible. Let's simplify things a bit. Let's reduce the load of unnecessary stress on our mind. Let's learn new things, take up hobbies. Let's live life to the fullest. Let's simplify things and amplify the happiness in life!