It is said that there are none more staunch in their beliefs than the newly converted. I am not talking about the conversion issue that holds the stage in India at present, but rather, of what most of us go through on an everyday basis.
Don’t you often have to fend off people trying to convert you to their beliefs — whether they are good, tasteful, useful or just ‘different’?
Take the case of your suddenly-svelte friend. Well, not so suddenly, if truth be told, since she has been practising power yoga for months, subscribing to a food journal, making sure to write every bite and zipping her lip each time the sugary desserts appears before her — even as you have been indulging yourself all through the year, going overboard with pre and post-New Year festivities and merely taking a couple of leisurely strolls past her house now and then.
When you compliment her on her new look, she naturally beams with pleasure — and launches almost immediately into a spiel about the benefits of yoga, the advantages of discipline and control and tells you how good you would feel had you followed the same exercise routine. She elaborates on the other changes she has noticed in her physical and mental health. Before you can agree or disagree with her or even nod in acknowledgement, she gives the location of her yoga instructor, the phone number, the timings of all sessions, maybe even details of some of the participants in her class who have gone from ungainly to fit and stiff to limber.
You have barely managed to store all the information you have just received within the limited data space in your memory, when you come upon another friend who looks unreasonably and unfairly healthy after the overindulgence of the past month. You walk a little way with him and he extols the virtues of oil pulling, a term you have never heard before. If you are wise, you will nod and look knowledgeable, but obviously, you are not, because you ask: “What’s that?” And, in the space of the next half-hour, you get to know — in much more graphic detail than anticipated.
You’re almost sure you wouldn’t like to try it, but you have to accept that you have never heard this friend complain of any of the minor ailments that lay most of us low at least a couple of times a year. Could his theory and his practice have something in it? Something you could be inveigled into trying?
If you think that’s the end of your experience, you are of course mistaken. There is more to come around the next corner — and the next — for any willing listener.
There are the firm vegetarians, the equally adamant non-vegetarians, liberal vitamin-pill-poppers, those who wax eloquent on naturopathy, and since everything is not about health and nutrition, there are the champions for the smart phone, the Android advocates, any number of believers in either this or that; and supporters of both this and that ... Every one with some essential truths and many attractions.
You think that you have had just about all you can take and when you see your next acquaintance heading your way, you take refuge in the nearest activity you can sign up for: Be it zumba, Pilates, crochet, or quilling ...
It’s not the best way to start out, but you do it. Casually, with no particular agenda in mind. Then gradually, you start noticing the change in you and you start counting the benefits.
And before you know it, you are out there, joining the ranks of those trying to convert others to their way of thinking.
Cheryl Rao is a freelance journalist based in India.
