I Moved Your Cheese is much more than an entertaining best-seller, having sold a couple of million copies

worldwide. Renu Kakkar takes us through the book with candour and witty alacrity.
Wisdom does not drop from the sky like mangoes, sometimes you have to wrestle with wisdom and put
it in a half-nelson
Darrel Bristow-Bovey
Honestly, I moved Your cheese is quite a ridiculous book!
On the face of it, it is not very clear why Award Winning Columnist, Darrel Bristow-Bovey, had to write
this self-help book for people who want to take no steps at all to change their predicaments.
But one must agree that appearances are deceptive!
Fed up of the advice doled out by the multitude of Self-Help books which compel the Individual to work
towards happiness, the author opines that he penned down this book for the lazy and lackadaisical lot
since the whole slew of self-help books written before have failed to address this hapless class of aimless
individuals.
In fact, the writer startles his readers with astute advice on Always be yourself - he abhors this
centuries old life saying (as being a panacea to happiness) and labels it as sheer muddle-headed
misnomer.
Leaving aside the nature nurture debate, Being Yourself is fraught with peril, insists the author. He opines,
Most of us, deep down are sneaking, skulking, sometimes snivelling scared cats, emotionally ambivalent
and morally tenuous...Why would we be that person ? In a world of people who seem rather more
interesting than we are, why should we be stuck with ourselves?
He substantiates his argument and goes on to emphasise that Dont feel you have to always be yourself.
Be someone else if necessary (for instance, if you are Slobodan Milosevic then be someone who isnt a
genocidal villain). In other words, the author makes it amply clear that All things can be faked, you can
be anyone you want to be!!!
We must agree, that Darrels literary style is razor-edged and he often adopts a jussive mood to sanctify
his arguments. Needless to say that the humour used by him throughout the book simply hits you in the
face!! The writer is almost brazen about the fact that he has used wit as a deliberate tool to convey his
messages to his readers when he states that its not even necessary to read this book, Simply Buying it
and keeping it displayed in a prominent position will make you a brighter, happier and a more desirable
person.
How will Darrels book achieve this? In fact, how can any book bestow this bliss on an individual who
hasnt even flipped through the pages of book? Sounds absurd, right? Not really, the author says, Our
pages have been treated with a revolutionary new formula that allows wisdom through a process we
have patented under the name Osmatix to pass directly from the page into the atmosphere, where it
can be easily inhaled from a reclining position." Can a book do this?
Well! No, it is unscientific right?
Wrong! Ignore the fooling around of the Osmatix discovery.
The book though horrendously sheepish in fact runs deep. The thoughts and observations are definitely
for people who do not or cannot construe simple English which is often the common mode in several
Self-Help Books such as Tuesdays with Morrie, Who Moved your Cheese and others of the same ilk.
It must also be reiterated that this book is for those who do not comprehend direct instructions by which
I mean to say is when somebody tells an individual what he/she is doing is wrong for his/her life (and
times), he/she runs and does the very same things in bigger dozes.
I consider myself as the one belonging to the second category. Ten pages through this 90-page book and
the first impressions I had was, Mr Bovey , did you really want to write this book? Twenty pages more and I
told myself, Okay, I get your point, and your point is not bad at all! Forty pages further, and I was convinced
that Bovey had actually read some of the self-help books at which he had poked fun or made satirical
comments about.
Yes! you guessed it. As a Lazy Person's guide to helping themselves, the book embarks on the use of
reverse psychology eagerly pitching for everything wrong ..and wanting to replant all of that solidly back
into your psyche through a back handed message which reads Boss, its your life go ahead and ruin it !!!
But towards the end of the book, I was let down. The book which started out as a satire and could have
been transformed into an effective self-help tool by going deeper into the psyche of a retrograde and lazy
human being, falls short of delving beyond a certain realm although the author could have perhaps
achieved this with ease and lucidity.
Probably, there is method and logic in restraining his views In fact, by the time you are on the last page,
you are left with the feeling that Darrel might have written the book for himself. This is because he
claims that his target readers or the diehard couch potatoes and lazy non- reforming human beings lose
interest mid-way through all that he has said.
And the satire is alluring while it lasts and Darrel is aware of it. He even suggests, Anyone who bought
this book hoping for some help with coming to terms with being retrenched from the left handed hula
hoop factory is probably going to be sitting there now tearing out the pages and using them as cocktail
napkins. He is going to be calling up his other retrenched buddies and saying, Say have you fellows
read I Moved Your Cheese? You have? What say we go over to the bastard's house and clean his clock for
him
Finally, in stark contrast to the statement above are gems of wisdom (which no other book contains) that
Darrel addresses right in the beginning of the book with sheer ease and lucidity.
And the review would be incomplete, if we do not touch upon his search for a Guru who sits on top of a
mountain and throws rotten tropical fruits on the heads of those venturing up the hill to seek his advice.
The author, too, arrives here but is spared of the ordeal. Thus, he reiterates: I was expecting the worst
but now that the worst has not arrived, I am disappointed. I am the architect of my own dismay.