THE ABOVE TITLE should really have a question mark after it. It is a serious question, and merits a serious answer. To call the current professional situation a rat race is absurdly litotic. My mother, at this advanced age (mine, not hers), still wonders why I’m not making as much money as some of my peers. “Why did you bring me up on stories of Rama and Krishna?” I’ll ask her one of these days. “You should have told me about Tata and Birla.” Ten years from now, there’ll be an Amar Chitra Katha comic on Dhirubhai Ambani’s life.
Until that happy day dawns, we have the self-help books. They’ve come a long way since the granddaddy of the genre, Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People, was published in 1936. James Thurber did a hatchet job on the first generation of self-helpers in The New Yorker (his essays were collected in 1937 in a volume called Let Your Mind Alone!). Thurber wrote:
I have devoted myself to a careful study of as many of these books as a man of my unsteady eyesight and wandering attention could be expected to encompass. And I decided to write a series of articles…offering some ideas of my own, the basic one of which is, I think, that man will be better off if he quits monkeying with his mind and lets it alone.
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