This one was Pappu’s first book, and his best too. It’s so close to my heart because I bought it about 2 years before he was born. Got it on clearance sale in landmark. Even though I had no plans or wishes to have a child then, I figured out that it was too good a price to miss. So I brought it all the way to Singapore along with my other books during relocation. I read it to him first when he was just 2 months old and he surprised me by cooing his loudest and happiest coos of that time. I don’t know what exactly he saw in it but he loved it. May be it was the brilliant coloured and clearly spaced pictures that caught his attention.

The book was always with us and even when we went to India for a month last year, we brought this along with only his rubber duckie, the two of his life savers. Whatever the situation might be, it would be solved if he had either of these.

At one stage when he started crawling, whenever he wanted me to do something that I didn’t want to do, I would tell him to search his book and would say a sentence or two from the book. He would immediately laugh and run in search of the book. He would find it out and thus engage himself. I had read the same book over and over to him so much that he knew it all by heart.

And of course, not to mention the robustness of the book, it has survived for 13+ months of playing with and it still holds it’s charm and is still in his favourites list. Looks good enough to save for the next child, except for this:

A part of it has already been ingested.

This is another book that I hold close to my heart because of the value it creates. Even though Pappu is still too young to learn to pray, considering that even his parents are also learning to pray now, we thought it was a better idea to start him up early so that we can learn together. This book came as a bliss. It’s not religious, which is a sigh of relief for me. I wanted my family to learn to differentiate religion and faith even though we will be teaching him the value of religion.

And the best part is it’s all about saying thank you. What a great way to get children started on prayers!

It serves as a great tool to create family time at the end of the day, when we all get to bed ready to cuddle and then to sleep. Because this is also a time for Pappu to learn a proper bed time routine without involving mommy’s breasts. As I said , we are all learning together. Regarding his current routine of drinking himself to sleep, I certainly need hubby’s help.

It talks about everything that a child might think of. It starts thanking god for the morning (I read this part every morning) nature, and then the animals, friends, rain, sunshine, scary things too, and family and ends with a couple of night time songs and rhymes. Even though Pappu looks a bit too young to understand all these, I keep reading it every night and soon he will start to read himself and understand the true meaning of it.

At a first glance through the pages, I realized that this was going to be either “Wow it changed my life” book or a “What the…?” book. I’m just fortunate that it turned out to be the first type.

“As you learn The Secret, you will come to know how you can have, be or do anything you want. You will come to know who you really are. You will come to know the true magnificence that awaits you in life.” — from the introduction

After finishing, I told my friends, if I were to list all the $20 I ever spent in my life, this one would be on top. This is something that changes lives.

The book says that The Secret is the law of attraction. Like attracts like, talking at a level of thought. At this point, I was able to grasp something. Yeah, this pretty much explains how on somedays something that upsets me only attracts more bad things, shaping up the so called bad days which makes you feel like you are the most miserable person on earth.

According to The Secret, if used properly, the most powerful law of the universe can be explained in 3 simple words: Thoughts become things. To explain further, what we think in our mind is what we will hold in our hand.  

At this point, the book was getting hard to understand. And soon I realized that it was even harder to believe. Faith is not something that comes overnight, right. I had to first understand how this thoughts thing works. I wanted a believable and scientific approach. Not just superstitious. And I got a more reasonable one.

When we think, we are emitting frequencies which brings back similar frequncies toward us. We are like a human trasmission tower. Imagine sitting in our couch and waching TV. Aren’t we able to sit right here and change channels with our remote control? I don’t know how an antenna works. But I do know that every channel works on some frequency and with the help of the antenna and remote control, we change those frequencies. If this is possible, why thoughts could not work that way? It was surprising.

We always think. It is said that each of us have atleast 60000 thoughts per day. Quite a lot, huh? Now, if only we can control them! No its not possible to control or even monitor all our thoughts but ofcourse we could monitor our feelings. Depending on if we are feeling good or bad, we could change what we are thinking.

The most important lesson I learnt was how negative things appear in life even if we do not want it to come. Why do those get attracted? The answer was simple. The law of attraction doesn’t compute words of negation. When I don’t want something to happen, my dominant thought is what I do not want to happen. And that’s what happens.
It pretty much explained everything that happened in the past. The next few chapters of the book, about how to apply the secret, how to use the 3 step process of asking, believing, and receiving, etc, I should say, changed my whole life. Oh yeah, it’s not at all easy. Believing is not easy. But this book taught me that if only we believed, we could make dreams come true.