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 “Don’t feel you have to always be yourself. Be someone else if necessary (for instance, if you are Slobodan Milosevic then be someone who isn’t 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 Darrel’s 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 Darrel’s book achieve this? In fact, how can any book bestow this bliss on an individual who hasn’t 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.”