History of spices, being grateful, and on Raymond Poulidor
Last two weeks were tough. Little reading but here are few that stayed with me:
• A remarkable short history of spices appeared in the NYTimes last week. Growing up in India, I am familiar with spices — turmeric, ginger, cardamom — to name a few. My mother uses them liberally in her food, and when she is cooking, the aroma wafts throughout our home. These years, when we travel to India we bring back packets of spices with us for the ones we get in Sweden don’t taste quite the same. However, despite the common, almost unwarranted consumption of spices, we rarely realise the history that relates to spices. Simply put, wars were fought, territories occupied and people killed to control spice trade. Therefore, this story, about something so commonplace that we don’t even bother thinking about, is worth a read. Unsurprisingly, Indian cooking shows up in every paragraph, and while reading this story I was reminded of the dull history books that I was made to read in schools in India when I was growing up. They all informed about the spice trade, described how the British and the Dutch were fervent, almost insatiable spice traders who later led a colony building spree. At that time, hardly did I understand how such inconsequential food additives could lead to wars. But history teaches us that it’s the economy that moves the world around, that propels men to seek new sources of wealth. Spices were the oil of that time.
• On Thanksgiving, Bill George wrote this piece in HBR. It revisits the old wisdom that gratitude makes you happier and productive — a fact that has been proven scientifically. Expressing gratitude is a topic that I am stumbling across again and again. Maybe it’s that time of year. For instance, here is another piece from Arianna Huffington on this topic where she says that instead of being grateful for one day in the year, we should rather express gratitude daily. ‘It’s like white blood cells for the soul, protecting us from cynicism, entitlement, anger and resignation — a small miracle that produces a lingering moment of grace,’ she writes. But how do you practice it? One way to do so is to keep gratitude journal, where you write a few things that you are grateful for before sleeping. I tried it a few times, and soon realised that I was repeating the list of things. It was on a meditation course around this time last year that my teacher, Dinesh Ghodke, taught me a trick that I try to stick to. The trick is to list five things daily that you are grateful for, and to not repeat them. This was a constructive twist, for what it does is that instead of relying on big ticket items that I am grateful for — my family, health, and so forth — I started searching for new things every day, which could for instance simply be the nice hot chocolate I have had. When you know that you have to find those five items to put in your journal, you will eagerly seek them even in otherwise drab routines. I am not perfect in expressing gratitude, and where I fail is in my journaling which is often the last thing I do before sleeping. To maintain discipline, I am applying the principle of habit stacking, which is combining journaling with another habit (‘after I sit down to dinner, I will say one thing I’m grateful for that happened today’) so that it flows naturally and I don’t have to force my mind to remember it.
• As I have written earlier, I am a sucker of The Economist’s obituaries. Here is another one that came out last week on French celebrity cyclist, Raymond Poulidor, who died at the age of 83. ’Eight times Raymond Poulidor stood on the podium at the end of the Tour de France, soaked in sweat, exhausted and smiling his big gap-toothed smile. He was just never on the top step,’ so starts the first lines of the obituary. It’s a worthy read not only for the quality of writing, but also given that we are on the topic of gratitude. Poulidor considered himself lucky to even be cycling. The other option would have been to end up as a farmhand. His gratefulness captured aptly by the obituary writer while ending this piece: 'Eight times he had got within touching distance, and lost them all. But he could still say, as he often did, “Look how close I came!”’
A quote I came across last week:
“If all you did was just looked for things to appreciate, you would live a joyously spectacular life.”
