LIFE LESSONS FROM KUMBH - PART II

 

 

 

Last year I was in Sangam, the holy confluence of the Holy Ganga and Yamuna in Prayagraj, to take the holy dip during the Maha Kumbh. I have, in a previous blog, told that story, anf if you have missed it then this is where you can find it: https://surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com/2025/02/life-lessons-from-kumbh.html

 

The evenings in Kumbh Mela were very interesting. There was something for everyone. From sadhus smoking strong intoxicants from their earthen chillum to some buried neck deep in the river sand to some reciting mantras in rich Sanskrit, there was a wide plethora of sainthood on display. I was most attracted to a sadhu was delivering a very profound and soulful lecture on life lessons – what prevents us from leading a happy life, and what changes can we bring within us to lead a happy life. He was young and he spoke Queen’s English to translate what he was saying in Hindi, because there were quite a few foreigners in that gathering. To some from Latin America he effortlessly conversed in Spanish too! So, this is what he said that evening:

 

If we take a good look at ourselves, we’ll discover that our lives are lead by many factors that create a great deal of tension, pain, and suffering within us. Instead of letting go of these things and allowing ourselves to feel free, we cling to them zealously, confident that they are our fortune. No more! From now on, we will give up on things that no longer serve us and adopt a change

 

1. You can be nice and not right, once in a while.

Many of us don’t tolerate the idea that we’re wrong. We want to always be right and for us, we are always right, even at the cost of ending great relationships or causing pain and stress to ourselves and others. It's just not worth it! Whenever you feel the need to jump into an argument ask yourself: "Is my ego really so big?", "Do I prefer to be right or would I rather be nice?" 

 

2. Give up the need for control

Be willing to give up the need to always be in control of what is happening to you and your surroundings - situations, events, people, and circumstances. Whether the people around you are loved ones or just strangers on the street - let them be. Let the world catch its trouble just as it is, and you'll see how much better you’ll feel. Just remember: "The world is vanquished by those who let it be, but when you try and try, the world will always be invincible."

 

3. Give up blame

Give up your need to blame others for what you have or do not have, what you feel or do not feel. Stop wasting energy and take responsibility for your life.

 

4. Give up defeatism

So many people hurt and cripple themselves because of negative thinking and a defeatist perception of themselves. Don’t believe everything your brain tells you, especially if it's negative. You're better than that! The mind is a superb instrument if used rightly. Used wrongly, however, it becomes very destructive.

 

5. Give up limiting beliefs

Give up the limitations of 'can or cannot' of ‘possible or impossible'. From now on you won’t let limiting beliefs keep you stuck in the wrong place. Spread your wings and fly high! A belief is not an idea held by the mind, it is an idea that holds the mind. I have elaborated this in a previous blog:   https://surajitbrainwaves.blogspot.com/2017/11/the-death-of-i-cant_30.html

 

6. Give up the complaints

Give up the constant need to complain about all the things, people, situations, events, and circumstances that make you feel unhappy and depressed. No one can make you sad and no situation can make you unhappy unless you allow it. It isn’t the situation that triggers these emotions, but your choice of how to look at things. Never underestimate the power of positive thinking.

 

7. Give up the luxury of criticism

Give up the need to criticize things, events, and people who are different from you. We are all different, but similar in one thing: we want to be happy, loving, loved and understood. Do not judge the means others adopt on their way to achieving this goal.

 

8. Give up the need to impress others

This is a juvenile habit. Stop trying to be something you are not, just to please others. It doesn’t work that way. Once you stop trying to be someone else, once you remove the mask and start being your "true self," people will be attracted to you, effortlessly.

 

9. Give up resistance to change

Change is good. Change helps us move from point to point. Change helps improve your life and that of those around you. Adopt change and don’t oppose it. Joseph Campbell said: "Follow your bliss and the universe will open doors where there were only walls.”

 

10. Give up labels

Stop labeling things, people and events that you don’t understand or that seem strange to you. Try to open your mind, step by step. Minds work only when they are open. The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something that you don’t know anything about.

 

11. Give up your fears

Fear is only an illusion, it does not exist, we create it. It's all in our minds. Fix what you feel inside and things on the outside will work out on their own. Franklin Roosevelt said: "The only thing we have to fear is fear itself."

 

12. Give up the excuses

Pack all the excuses in a box and send them away, because today you have no need for them. Many times we limit ourselves to our excuses. Instead of growing and improving ourselves and our lives, we get stuck in our own lies and make excuse after excuse. In the end, 99.9% of these excuses are not real.

 

13. Give up the past

This is difficult, especially when the past looks much better than the present and the future looks scary. But keep in mind that the current moment is all you need and everything you will ever need. Don’t forget that the past you miss so much is the one you ignored when it was present. Stop deluding yourself. Be present in everything you do and enjoy life - after all, life is a journey, not a destination. Adopt a clear vision for the future, but don’t forget to be present here in the Now.

 

14. Give up attachments

For many, this concept is hard to understand, but with time, practice, sincerity and awareness it will become obvious. Make a distinction between the things you love and the things you stick to. These are two different things - love comes from a pure place, clinging comes from a place of fear. Once you have detached yourself you can be peaceful and patient.

 

15. Give up the need to meet the expectations of others

Too many people live a life that is not theirs. They live their lives according to what others think is good and right for them; According to what their parents say, their company dictates, their community members expect and the government determines. The culture in which we live paves a "norm" that causes us to ignore our inner voice and lose control. Over time, we forget what makes us happy and what we want. Don’t let distractions divert you from the path you are paving.

With this the Sadhu sweetly smiled at the gathering, folded his hands and said ‘namaskar’. The crowd slowly dispersed. This was a truly digital Kumbh. Digital innovations and AI were used to help crowd management. Thousands of drones were employed to monitor the security at the Mela site. Meanwhile, devotees had been given radio frequency wristbands to help locate lost family members who got separated in the crowd. Kumbh Mela attracts people from all walks of life, from sadhus to ordinary citizens, including families and international visitors. This is a true ocean of humanity in search of salvation. I do not know whether the holy dip in Sangam brings salvation of the soul or not, but getting acquainted with learned people like the Sadhu we just heard, surely brings salvation to the mind.

THE JOB THAT ONCE DEFINED LIFE NOW FEELS LIKE A DISPOSABLE UPGRADE

In our generation, we went to work wanting a salary. Our children now go to work wanting a salary, mental health, work-life balance, personal growth, the option of working from home, a nice boss, and work that doesn’t make them question the point of being alive. And by the way, Gen Z wants all this before lunch. For us, a job was what we did. For them, it is something they have to be. Leaving a job, therefore, becomes an attempt to change themselves.

 

Our parents were lifelong Tata or Railway or Maruti men and women. Loyalty toward their employers was fiercely ingrained. Changing jobs felt like breaking a loyalty code—absolutely unthinkable. Employers, in turn, took care of them with perks, promotions, bonuses, LTCs, medical benefits, provident funds, retirement support, and sometimes even jobs for family members. What was wrong with that system? Why did it break down? Are the younger generations unstable and impatient, or progressive and ambitious as they claim?

 

What Held the Old Compact Together—and Why It Fractured

The old model worked in a relatively closed, slower-moving economy dominated by public-sector undertakings and a handful of large private houses. Jobs were scarce, alternative opportunities limited, and the social contract was clear: stay loyal, work steadily, and the organization would provide security across a lifetime and sometimes across generations. Productivity expectations were different; the pace of technological change was gentler; and competition, both domestic and global, was muted.

 

That world ended with economic liberalisation, globalisation, the rise of private and multinational capital, rapid technological disruption, and the shift from stakeholder capitalism toward sharper quarterly performance pressures. Lifelong employment guarantees became liabilities. Mass restructuring and layoffs moved from exceptional responses to routine efficiency tools. Pensions and long-term benefit structures weakened. Skills began to get obsolete faster. The mutual expectation of loyalty eroded because the structural conditions that sustained it disappeared. Employers could no longer (or would no longer) promise the old security; workers rationally stopped offering the old permanence and loyalty.

 

Data on tenure reflects this. Average early-career stints have shortened markedly for younger cohorts, with some reports putting Gen Z’s average tenure in the first five years around 1.1 years in certain markets, compared with longer spans for earlier generations at similar life stages. Job-change intentions remain high among Indian professionals. At the same time, careful historical comparisons (especially from the United States) suggest that young workers have always changed jobs more frequently than older ones; the perception of unprecedented restlessness is sometimes amplified by visibility and weaker traditional retention mechanisms such as defined-benefit pensions. There are exceptions to this rule too in Japan and Korea, where workers are still fiercely loyal to Toyota, Honda, Samsung and Hundai.

 

The New Expectations Are Not Pure Whimsy

Younger workers grew up watching the old promises break—layoffs even in “stable” companies, stagnant real wage growth in parts of the economy, the disappearance or reconfiguration of entry-level roles under automation and AI, and the rise of contractual and gig arrangements. In that environment, prioritising mental health, flexibility, purpose, continuous learning, and the option to leave is less pure impatience and more risk management. Many surveys show Gen Z and millennials ranking work-life balance, growth opportunities, and meaningful work highly—sometimes above pure title progression. They treat careers more like skill portfolios than lifelong identities with one organization or employer.

 

Novelty has come from Consumer Technology to Profession

The impatient generation often treats jobs the way it treats phones, bikes, or watches—constant upgrades, endless consumption, and diminishing joy after each change. Incremental switches rarely transform the fundamental experience of work. Anticipation and waiting once formed part of pleasure and forced accumulation of depth; constant movement can leave people permanently in the shallow end. Money remains a means; sustained satisfaction and those infrequent “aah” moments still require diligence, hard work, and time spent mastering something rather than endlessly shopping for the next role.

 

A perfectly good job accepted last year as a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity can feel embarrassingly obsolete today not because the job changed that dramatically, but because the cultural expectation of perpetual novelty has been imported from consumer technology into professional life.

 

Productivity, Investment, and the Cost of Restlessness

High attrition is not costless. Training investments are lost, institutional knowledge walks out the door, team cohesion suffers, and managerial attention is diverted to constant hiring and onboarding. In manufacturing and other capital-intensive sectors, elevated early attrition has been flagged as a real constraint on scaling and quality consistency. Employers, domestic and foreign, notice when workforce instability raises the effective cost of operations. This feeds into broader debates about why large-scale industrial investment sometimes hesitates.

 

Labour-law liberalisation is frequently proposed as part of the solution: greater flexibility in hiring and separation so firms can scale without fear of permanent rigidities, and so labour can flow more easily toward higher-productivity uses. Evidence from Indian manufacturing and cross-country studies is mixed and context-dependent. Excessive rigidity can discourage formal employment and firm growth; excessive precariousness can reduce incentives for firm-specific training and raise turnover costs. Balanced reform that improves both flexibility and basic security (while encouraging formalisation) is more promising than pure deregulation. But laws alone will not restore mutual commitment if the deeper cultural shift toward short-termism continues unchecked on both sides.

 

Neither Pure Nostalgia nor Uncritical Celebration

The old system had real strengths—stability, intergenerational continuity, and a sense that work was embedded in a longer life narrative. But it also tolerated stagnation, limited mobility, and sometimes nepotistic or low-accountability arrangements. The new ethos has strengths—greater agency, insistence on humane conditions, faster skill acquisition, and reduced tolerance for toxic environments. But it risks producing chronic restlessness, shallow expertise, and a workplace in which neither side feels secure enough to invest deeply.

 

Lasting joy and competence still tend to come from how we experience and master work over time, not from the next acquisition. Getting good jobs is becoming harder in a competitive, skills- and AI-disrupted market; executing them with diligence is harder still when the cultural default is perpetual readiness to leave. Employers who offer genuine growth, fair treatment, and some predictability will retain more talent. Workers who cultivate patience, depth, and the capacity to create their own “aah” moments will extract more meaning—and often more long-term reward—than those who treat every role as a temporary upgrade.

 

The real task is not to romanticise the Railway or Tata man of the past, nor to celebrate endless job-hopping as pure progress. It is to rebuild a workable social contract for work in which loyalty is earned rather than assumed, patience is valued without becoming stagnation, and the job remains a significant part of life without having to be the entirety of the self. That balance is harder than either generation’s preferred story admits—but it is the only one that sustains both productivity and human satisfaction.

MENTAL STRENGTH – A PRICELESS POSSESSION

 

 

Cristiano Ronaldo has all the silverwares in his cupboard except the FIFA World Cup and even though he is 41 he is back to give it a last try. His contemporary and the Argentine superstar Lionel Messi is 39, has won the last World Cup, has battled several injuries, but is back again for one more time. Vaibhav Suryavanshi, the 15 years old boy wonder from Bihar, blazed the recently concluded IPL with mind boggling strike rate and an all time record number of sixes against the best bowlers of the world. What do all these three have in common? They have enormous mental strength. It is not that they don’t fail, they treat their failure as yet another stepping stone towards success, a success that never satisfies them. Despite physical pain and hardship they return to practice and to their big game because of their mental strength.

 

Mental toughness or emotional resilience, is the capacity to handle life’s pressures, setbacks, and challenges effectively while maintaining wellbeing and pursuing goals. In moments of weakness and crisis, after our body has exhausted all its forces, the only thing we have left that can give us the last push we need is our mental strength. We all have mental power at some level or another, and the question is not just how strong it is in general, but how powerful it is in relation to our goals. A person who tries to lose weight and doesn’t give up for a long time is a person of great mental strength. Who doesn’t like to sleep an extra hour in the morning, but to force oneself out of bed and go out for a morning run needs mental strength.

 

The reverse is far more common. So many people try to lose weight and stop or give up after a few months with excuses, although they have not yet reached their goal, These people suffers from weak mental strength. Mental strength is like a muscle that can be trained and strengthened.

Let us see how:

 

1. Be honest with yourself

One in every 4 calories we put into our body is designed to give energy to the brain. When we lie, whether for ourself or for others, some of the brain must remember the truth, while other parts must remember the lie. In order to keep these two memories, we have to feed our brain with 2 times the calories to provide the energy needed for the double action. If we are honest with ourself 100% of the time, we will be less concerned and our brain can operate more efficiently and calmly, which will help improve our mental strength at the moments we need it.

 

2. Think of others more than yourself

Tony Robbins, a writer and personal consultant who has written two books on psychology and self-help, claims that in order to succeed, you have to serve as many people as possible. Someone who is mentally strong always tries to help solve other’s problems and seeks ways to make life easier for others. The best example is our Prime Minister, Narendra Modi. At 75 he can work tirelessly with just four hours of sleep because he is working for others, for his country and his party. If you want to be mentally stronger, think less of yourself and see how you can use your knowledge and abilities to help others. Once you understand that you are not at the center of the universe and that you can help others feel that they are, the mental strength and success will come on their own.

 

3. Read books

This unfortunately is a trend we are losing. Social media has reduced our attention span. Reading books is a priceless habit because we live only once, and in one lifetime we can accumulate only that much of experience. However, when we read a book, we are sucked into the lives of others for several days, weeks, or months, and we experience it together with them knowing that in the end all with be resolved. We return to our lives after learning from their mistakes and experiences, and of course a little about ourselves, and that's how we get stronger with each book we read.

 

4. Cultivate healthy relationships

Around every successful person, there are a number of close friends who make them who they are. In fact, many of the most successful billionaires, outstanding athletes, great scientists and talented artists in the world claim that each of us is the average of the five people with whom we spend most of our time. Every successful person in the world surrounds themselves with people who love them, support them, and help him think of and come up with ideas. Surround yourself with the right people who will build you up and not tear you down. Befriend people smarter than you, and develop your own circle of genius around you. They will add to your mental strength.

 

5. Be curious

The only way to learn how things work is through curiosity and asking questions. We are born curious, we broke the radio in childhood to see who was speaking from inside. But, while growing up we lost that curiousness. We were disciplined to conform to a ‘good boy/girl’ type. Now, at this stage of life, find people who inspire your curiosity and from whom you’d like to learn the most. The dumber you think your question is, the faster you need to ask it. There is no stupid question in a field you aren’t familiar with and people with knowledge in the same field will be happy to share it with you. If you are ashamed to ask a question, challenge yourself to ask 2 questions. Shy people don’t make much progress in life and the only reason is that they prevent it from themselves. Curiosity is like an appetite, and you have to feed it as long as it is hungry so you can get the nutrients that your brain needs to get stronger.

 

6. Take care of your health

The type of food we eat also affects the brain's activity and our mental strength. It is hard to be strong and creative and to carry out our ideas when we are ill in bed, or even when our bodies prefer to lie on the couch than to run. You don’t have to lift weights and build muscle to feel healthy, sticking to a healthy diet is enough. Walking at least half an hour every day and 8 hours of sleep each night will allow your brain to work best.

 

7. Learn and repeat what you have learned

Many studies show that students in schools and universities forget almost everything they heard during a lecture 45 minutes after leaving the classroom. To keep information that has just entered your mind for the first time, it is strongly recommended that you write it down or use it in conversation during the hour after the lesson has finished. The next day, repeat the material learned through conversation, so you can make sure it stays in your head for a long time. The best way to instill new knowledge in your mind is to teach it to someone else, so it is strongly recommended that you share with others what you learn. This is something which we practiced in our residency days in King George’s Medical College, and the stuff I taught as a resident to my juniors, is still fresh in my mind.

 

8. Don’t limit yourself

People with mental strength give themselves permission to do things that they haven’t tried before and experience new things. In addition, they give themselves permission to come up with bad ideas, take risks, slip and fall and try again. If you don’t give yourself permission to re-create your world, no one else will give it to you, and it will limit you to the world you know, which will prevent growth and progress toward new things that will improve your quality of life and give you personal satisfaction from what you have achieved in life. Impossible can be made possible only by trying, modifying, and trying again but differently.

 

9. “Ideas” are priceless, keep them coming  

Today, the strongest "currency" in the global economy is ideas. In order to profit from ideas, one must first come up with them, and it is recommended that they be good. To improve your ability to come up with good ideas that will help you fulfill your ambitions, adopt a practice where you write 10 ideas a day on a variety of topics on a piece of paper. It works just like weight lifting - at first, it’ll be difficult, but over time your "muscle of ideas" will grow and strengthen. In the end, you’ll find that you have an almost supernatural ability to come up with a creative solution to any problem that life throws at you. Taking the beaten track is easy, but it cannot lead to a new place. To discover the new, you need a new idea.

 

10. Be present in the moment

Whenever you feel remorse about the past, or you are anxious about the future, you create a journey in time that takes you from the moment you are in and puts you somewhere else that has already passed or has not yet arrived and doesn’t exist. People with mental strength, who find themselves conducting such a journey in time, do so to learn from past mistakes, and plan for future success. Instead of messing with their troubles, which they can’t solve, they think about how they can help others solve their troubles. Miraculously, when this is done, life becomes less stressed, and the success and motivation we achieve in this way usually leads to other successes that guide the future to where we want to go.

 

 

Mental strength is like a muscle - we have to train it to strengthen it so we can use it during the difficult moments when we need it most. With mental strength we can overcome all our fears and all the moments when we feel we want to give up, throw up our hands and settle for what we’ve achieved so far, which usually isn’t the ultimate goal.