Thank you for having me.

Well, suit yourself. Thank you.

Well, I think a lot of us in our 40s, whether we are successful or not, we ask ourselves this question. We say, "Is this what life was all about?" In my case, it was a global meeting that we had with managers of Procter & Gamble from around the world. This particular one was dealing with Pampers, and I asked myself, "Well, surely there's a world beyond Pampers." I tried hard to concentrate, but this thought did not leave me. And, other thoughts also added to the moment because, I was a great cheerleader for India's reforms in 1991, and I'm talking about 93, 94, when the reforms were actually in trouble. The leftists, and particularly, the left wing of the ruling party were very articulate, felt that India had sold out to the market, to the multinationals. The usual rhetoric of the left. I was actually worried. So I went home and told my wife that there's more to life beyond Pampers, Vicks and wonderful products like Tide, Head & Shoulders, Pantene products. There was a world outside, and I felt that I should do something about it. And so, I shot off a telegram to somebody who I had met about a dozen years earlier. He was now the finance minister of India who had spearheaded these reforms, and I told him, "Why the hell aren't you defending the reforms?" The guy knew that I had been spending my weekends as a writer. I've been a weekend writer since my 20s. And he said, "Come back and you defend the reforms." That added to the spirit of it.

But, the reality is that this discomfort began in my 20s, to be very honest, I did a philosophy degree at Harvard. I didn't do business. I had no clue what business was all about. I was in business by accident. After Harvard, I had a scholarship to go and do a PhD in philosophy at Oxford. But I got cold feet at the last minute, and I had decided that I didn't want to spend the rest of my life in that stratosphere of abstract thought. I wanted a life of action. And so, I'd answered the first ad I found and they took me, this company that made Vicks VapoRub. Suddenly, I'm transported from the Ivy covered halls at Harvard to the dusty bazaars of India, selling Vicks to chemist shops and pharmacies and so on. After a little while, I missed the intellectual life. And it was then that my father said, "Look, you have the weekend. Why don't you use your weekend to do something that you really like?" So, one Sunday morning, I sat down, I said, I'm going to write a play, and then to give myself moral force, I said to myself, "Well, Shakespeare too, must have sat down to write Hamlet one morning, so I can do it." No sane person compares themselves to Shakespeare. But there I was, and that's how I started as a weekend writer. My friends played golf on the weekend. I wrote.

Right through my 20s and 30s, I had been a weekend writer. I had worn two hats. By the time I was ready to quit the corporate world, I had the confidence. My plays have done well. They had performed. One of them Off-Broadway, another one at the Edinburgh Festival and on BBC. I had the confidence, I knew I could write and that's how I decided to quit and change from being a business executive to a starving writer. My wife said, "You're going to be a starving writer, are you?" I had to tell her that, "Look, we did have some savings, and that our standard of living wouldn't go up, but hopefully it wouldn't go down too badly."

I was 22 when I wrote my first play. When you start young, you have one advantage. If you are really creating a second life, it can be therapeutic, because if you wear two hats, a Monday-Friday hat and a Saturday-Sunday hat, if things are not going too well at work, you have the refuge of your book or whatever you're writing over the weekend. And if you are having a problem with a character on the weekend, you can always plunge back into your business life. I think that point you made about multiple identities is absolutely correct. The problem with the world today is, there's too much fundamentalism, and fundamentalism is all about privileging one identity, often a religious identity. We have so many people inside us, and we are creating ourselves all the time. Fundamentalism is fundamentally the poverty of this idea that you have only one overwhelming identity, where we should celebrate. The Hindu ideal of the 4 goals of life Artha, Dharma, Kama, Moksha. Artha means material well-being. You got to make a living, and you have to look after yourself and the family. Dharma is moral well-being, so you can sleep well at night. Then there's the third Kama, which is desire and pleasure. What's nice about the idea of Kama is that it is in the Indian subcontinent, one of the few places on the Earth where they elevate the idea of desire to a goal of life, recognizing that this too, is a capability that we all have, and fulfilling that emotional, sexual well-being is as important to any. And of course, the last one is Moksha, which means freedom. That's what the last book of mine is about. It's a very secular, non-religious, non-denominational idea of freedom, which I think all human beings ultimately seek in our lives. Usually it's freedom from expectations, society's expectations, your parents' expectations, and your own, those are the worst. The need to be somebody and not a nobody. The desire, the need to have to get premium treatment wherever you go. That's the freedom you need. That's why I thought the message that I was pointing to you, when I was 5 years old, and I'm here recalling to you the name, how I got it was the idea of taking your work seriously, but not yourself seriously. That's the route to real freedom.

Well, I put my energies really into my books as my journalistic pieces. I do go occasionally to universities, and I speak, but not a lot.

Well, it also is a bit of an insurance policy. In the sense, I thought, as I said, therapeutic in a way, but also that many people in their 40s or 50s find that, it's the midlife crisis and may not become a crisis, but all of us have said, "Is this what life is all about?" Surely, there's something else." And if you have, then something else that you are able to confidently do, then you also have the freedom to leave what you are doing. There's no point just quitting your job. I quit at 50 when the retirement age was 65. There's no point quitting 15 years earlier if you don't know what you want to do afterwards. A lot of people have that.

The nice thing is that if you've taken your weekend hat seriously, then one thing is you have confidence. You've practiced over 25 years as a weekend writer, or whatever you want to do.

Take your hobby as seriously as your job, you take everything that you do in that sense seriously, except don't take yourself seriously. That's a toxic direction to take.

As you've mentioned, I have just finished my memoir. By the way, I recommend to all your listeners to write a memoir. Why? Because the reward is that at the end, you'll get to know yourself and what could be a bigger reward? And there's a difference between an autobiography and a memoir.

An autobiography is a straightforward telling of your story. I was born here. I went to school here, I got married, I did this job and so on. Boring to the end. What the memoir tries to do is, it tries to connect the dots of your life. It tries to make sense of what those different moments of your life are, to find some pattern. When you find that pattern, you have that sense of Aha. You mean, "This is what I am like?" That's why I say, all the philosophers from Socrates on said, "Know yourself." And if you can actually get to know yourself and what better reward, whether you want to publish your memoir or not, doesn't matter. But the effort of reliving your life has huge rewards. For one thing, reliving your life is better than living it. And why? Because you can play God. You decide what incidents in your life you're going to include in your story. You can play God and you are the one who is in charge. In the end, since you have to select, it's a bit of fiction anyway, you're not going to say, I had dinner these days and this is what I ate for dinner. That's not very interesting. Of course, the big mistake we make, of course, as human beings is we like to look good, all of us. If you try to look good on every page, then the reader will get turned off. It is a pompous ass. Why should I listen to him? Why should I read him? And if you make the opposite mistake and try to be too humble and talk only about a lot of your failures, then the reader will say, "Oh, my God, he's a loser. Why should I read him?" It's best to be yourself. But in the end, I was saying it's a work of fiction.

As Mark Twain said, "There's no difference between fiction and nonfiction, except that fiction has to make sense."

You asked me to talk about the early period. I'll tell you, I was lucky that my mother kept a diary. I appear on page 17 for the first time in her diary, and she says, "He's a restless baby. Then 6 months later, I became a difficult child. She's calling me a difficult child. And a year and a half later, she's now calling me a troublemaker. You see the direction that my life is taking. At the age of two and a half, I learned to run. I've been running ever since. I'm often running into myself. That is the early phase in my life.

I must tell you that they gave me the name Ashok Kumar. Ashok Kumar means the prince of happiness. A nice name, prince of happiness. But my grandmother suspects that my mother, her daughter-in-law, has given me that name because she thinks my mother is secretly in love with the Bollywood actor named Ashok Kumar, who was a big deal in the 1940s. So, she takes me to her guru. She places me at his feet. She says to the guru, give this boy a name.

The guru, seeing me at his feet, calls me Guru Charan Das. Overnight, I have been transformed from the prince of happiness to the humble servant of the feet of the guru, which is what Guru Charan Das means. Many years later, when I'm grown up, I went to the guru and I said, "Why did you give me that name?" He has a good answer. He says, "You know, it's a good thing to be reminded about humility once in a while. But then he gives me the best definition of humility I have ever heard, which is what we've talked about. He said, take your work seriously, but not yourself seriously. That of course, is the freedom that is in the title of my book. That leads to the fundamental belief. A belief in the life we should live. We should live lightly. There's another Sanskrit word called Laghima. Laghima means lightness. When they talk about Laghima, they say, of light like a bird, not like a feather. Meaning, the bird has agency. Although the guru gave it some unusual circumstances, that's the theme of the book, freedom. The freedom when you're not taking yourself too seriously, you don't carry the burden of the world on your shoulders, and you live lightly. Like Yudishthir in The Mahabharat, his chariot went about 2 centimeters above the ground, that is really one way to live.

To be a starving writer, as my wife called it. She was quite worried. She said, "You know, the paycheck won't come at the end of the month." I said, "No." And she didn't know how we were going to manage. But, it's nice to be able to say that it was that freedom from significance that we all seek. I'd like to believe that, but I'm not sure how many other factors were playing in my mind to be very honest. You know, I had hoped that I would also become a better human being, as I transitioned from a businessman to a writer. But guess what? As a writer now, for 30 years, I have discovered that actually, business people are better human beings than writers. Why? Because business people instinctively depend on others. They have to have customers. You have to satisfy your customer if you want to succeed. They have suppliers. Every businessman has a temptation to squeeze the supplier a little bit too much. If you do too much, you get hurt because you get a defective component. They have to respect and be fair to their employees. Otherwise they'll leave you.

A businessman depends on others. A writer depends on no one. I sit in this room from 6 in the morning to 12. And I don't need anyone. I don't do emails in the morning. I don't answer the phone in the morning. I don't do any social media in the morning. I don't read the newspaper in the morning. I do nothing which will get me on someone else's agenda in the morning. That's how I've lived for the last 30 years.

I haven't tested myself, but I can only tell you that a few months ago, I went to a bookshop in my neighborhood. I knew the dealer. He knew me as a writer. And so, I found that in the shop window, my book wasn't there. I had recently published this book. So, I go charging in, and I say, "Hey, what's this? You know I'm an important writer. Why is my book not in the window?" He says sorry. He blames it on the shop boys or something. And then he places the book at the back. I said, "No, right in the front." You see the ego. That's why I say that this is a work in progress, my dear fellow. Don't take yourself seriously. It's definitely a work in progress. I try, but I ain't there yet.

The difference I find is that when I'm here in the morning in this room from 6 to 12. First of all, if I'm working on a book, I'm drawn here like a magnet from my bedroom. Then, I start striking the keys. The keys start getting hit, I don't know who's doing it, but the keys of my computer start. And then writing begins to appear on the screen. I'm not even aware of myself very often. In other words, I find when I'm really absorbed in the work, I forget myself. It's that idea of self-forgetting, which is what you are also talking about when you're writing a book. One thing you notice is, time gets distorted. You say, "Oh my God! It's already noon. I thought around 10 o'clock." You had lost 2 hours, because you were so absorbed in what you were doing, but you were not aware of yourself. I think our unhappiness, our problems, our burdens come from that awareness too often. Is my book on the bestseller list or not? That's what you were talking about.

If one could just write the book and then leave it for the market, to the publisher, that's his or her job to do. But, they also know that we all have egos and they make these book tours. I remember one of my most enjoyable book tours was to the United States, when "India Unbound" came out by Knopf. I went to these lovely bookshops where I talked on radio, NPR and television and all that. It was very enjoyable. But, that was not the payoff. The payoff is when you forget yourself. I think that's really the central idea of this freedom, that other sort of freedom that I'm talking about. Whenever I'm in that mode, I am free. But boy, suddenly you get a call from your publisher and you have to fly off somewhere. There's a literary festival in Calcutta or Kathmandu. Every place in India now seems to have a literary festival where you can spend all your time, if you want, in literary festivals, and you ought to say, "Stop it. No more. I have my next book to write."

The thing about it is, the other day, I was telling my wife that I sometimes have this uncanny feeling that while I was busy, life passed me by. Now I was actually quoting from Seneca. I tried to figure out what Seneca meant by this, because if somebody lived a life, it was Seneca. He was the leading intellectual of the Roman Empire, a poet, a playwright. He was the advisor to the emperor. And the emperor was incompetent. He was actually running the empire. And then, he had an affair with the Emperor's wife, and then he had to flee. Now, if somebody lived a life, boy, he lived a life. Why is he saying that when I was busy, life passed me by. That is a very troublesome thought that always goes through, I think I'm not alone, Seneca is not alone, but many of us go with that thought in our mind. That's to figure out what it is that life passed you by when you were busy.

Thank you.