Life is what we make it

Life Desk :
For reasons not completely known to me, I have an inordinate fascination with people’s lifestyles. So unrelenting is this interest in how other people choose to conduct their lives that a psychiatrist friend of mine, involved in research for a leading international hospital, swears he has instituted a question in his curriculum called “The What’s in the Sandwich Question” inspired by me.
Apparently, at a social gathering he was bemused to overhear me asking a young medical intern how she spent her day. At best a polite question at a social do, in this case it was followed by a series of supplementary questions, like what time she rose, which radio channel she preferred to tune in to, and finally, the clincher, after she’d said she’d make herself a sandwich to take to work, “What’s in the sandwich?” I’d enquired.
And though this interest has fuelled my journalism, that is just a collateral benefit. My real purpose is to expand my own knowledge about how to live an interesting, fulfiling and graceful life.
Yesterday, while exiting my neighbourhood club, for instance, I bumped into a real estate tycoon, a 40-something-year-old who had inherited a moribund enterprise and turned it around rapidly, making it vastly profitable. It was seven in the evening – he looked fresh and full of beans! “I’ve just begun a daily regime of an hour of swimming in the pool,” he said.
My regard for him rose. To make time for himself must have been a difficult choice, but one that would make a positive difference, not only to his abs, but also his to his peace of mind, his personal relations and, ultimately, his performance at work.
Lifestyle choices affect our lives in deep and extensive ways. How we choose to eat, sleep, unwind, travel and seek stimuli are often unexamined indications of our very core.
A writer I know, for instance, had suddenly removed herself from all social engagement. Someone once open and friendly, she deliberately distanced herself from the ebb and flow of social life. All she did was run and write. Nothing else mattered – not what she wore, ate or bought. “I realised each activity I used to be involved in took me away from my main purpose of writing. So, for three years, all I did was keep fit and write. You’d be surprised how easily people understood and left me alone,” she said. “It was as if they admired the decision and wished they could do it for themselves too.”
Until a decade ago, lifestyle choices and awareness in India were non-existent. You were expected to live and die pretty much as your parents had done, with no thought to your own dreams and desires. The car you could ultimately afford was one of the two produced in the country and often even the choice of its colour was not an option.
The same applied to everything else: the look of your home, the clothes you wore, what you ate, where you travelled – all this was a limited field that left you none the wiser.
Of course, today we might not have reached the bewildering options that those in America, for instance, have in their supermarkets, but we are not too far away. Which further fuels my interest in people’s lifestyle choices.
Incidentally, in her reply to my “what’s in the sandwich” query, the young medical intern had replied, “Grilled zucchini and quinoa salad, sprinkled with flax seeds, placed between seven-grain, cinnamon-flavoured, artisanal bread!”
– by Malavika Sangghvi, a Mumbai-based writer