Gerald D'Cunha

  “Don’t let the Joneses dictate your life. Their happiness might not be what you need.” Unknown   R ecently, during one of our PD (Personality Development) sessions, I was explaining to the young participants the meaning of the phrase ‘Some Things In Life Don’t Move’. I had decided to keep this as the title for the forthcoming book. The book was about Values in life… How some of our Values guided us just as lighthouses did for ships sailing in the seas… There was a young boy by the name Vihaan. I had taught his mother, uncles and aunts 35 years ago, when I had just started my classes at this place. Their family dealt in furniture, and I   had bought five moulded chairs from them. Suddenly, I looked at 16-year-old Vihaan and said to him, pointing at the chair I was sitting on, “ Beta, do you know how old this chair is?” Vihaan was clueless. I looked at the class and said, “I had bought it from Vihaan’s family store 35 years ago. I had bought five chairs. I st...

A wedding in the family is a wedding in the family. A lot of pressure, you see… I mean the social pressure… I hear some of you react, “What social pressure? It’s a wedding in ‘our’ family, it’s ‘our’ money, ‘our’ likes and dislikes… So, why should we care about what other people think of us?” Chalo… Blessed are those who really can go about handling the wedding in their family without caring for what other people think of them. They, in my opinion, are the strongest, wisest and the most peaceful people in the world… The rest of us, including myself, are just mortals… We battle with that ghost -   ‘Log kya kahenge?” S ome twenty five (or so) years ago, when a young boy and girl from a middle-class of a Mumbai family married, the honeymoon destinations used to be Mahabaleshwar, Matheran, Kandala or Lonavala. For the richer lot, it was Kashmir, Simla, Kulu-Manali, Ooti, Kodai Kanal, Mysore-Bangalore, Mount Abu etc. ‘Destination weddings’ was an a...