Weight Loss

Like Engineering Colleges, Nursing Colleges and B-Schools, every corner of the city got occupied with weight loosing parlours in last couple of years. Aim ? 36-24-36, wow! I’m going to reduce my weight. There are experts who can tell you what exercise to do to burn out which fat and tone up which muscle. It’s a science and an art. There were times when in a group photograph, if the photographer said “say cheese” we use to smile and say cheese. Now, for a snap people not only say cheese but also pull-in their paunch before the photographer clicks. We only said cheese, now we all eat a lot of it. A mirror shows up bulge on all the parts of my body which I have to work on. We are highly obsessed with obesity that we can see. Unfortunately, this external mirror doesn’t show me something important of me. It doesn’t show me the fat that my ‘ego’ has accumulated.

In fact, I very easily become a mirror of others’ ego e.g. I can see a lot of it in my mother, in my father, in my wife, building up in my children. My wife and I have long discussions about people’s ego, of the people we meet. Its so easy, literally happens, that you can make out how much egoistic the other is. The discrimination in my mind is so clear that I can have a scale of 100 and accurately tell how much ego somebody else has. Question is, where is the mirror to see my ego? I fight with auto drivers, with my wife, scold my children. I’m wondering whom I’ve not fought with. All those fights were because of my attachment to some traffic rule, some of my assumptions, my own conditionings. My conditioning is an infinitely big scaffold around me and jealousy, fear and anger is the fat stuck all around that scaffold. Melting that fat too is an art and a science.

Am I aware of my attachments, my scaffold, my beliefs, my fat? They are a very very very very deep part of me. And when the volcano erupts they flare out with tremendous intensity proportional to the depth of my attachment. Am I aware of them when I am not angry, while I am getting angry, while I am boiling with anger and when anger recedes? With all the body-fat can we also be sensitive about, obsessed about the I-fat? There are no parlours available to melt it, there are no treadmills to reduce it, no weighing scales to weigh it. Each of us individually has to look at it for ourselves. If we are seeing somebody else’s fat(ego) then remember that ‘I am seeing it because I have it’ and use that opportunity to jump into yourself, instantly. You may actually float if you lose the flab we spoke about :)