Gratitude is the password to happiness!

You feel you have met a bhangra dancer, a Sumo wrestler, a stand-up comic and a six-year-old — all at once — that’s so much energy her mere presence injects in you! 

Here is someone who has seen many storms in her life — broken bones, multiple miscarriages, a still-born baby after yet another prolonged conception process and two episodes of breast cancer within six years of each other! Anyone else may have crumbled. But Neerja is different! She’s happy facing her life, no matter what comes her way!   

Here’s a peek into her uncommon joie de vivre. “You know the best thing about having chemo(therapy)? No parlour visits – aha! Because no hair, you see! That’s happiness to me!” she says. 

Cancer, Neerja says, has to be faced, not feared. “No matter what, the treatment process has to be undergone – even if it means dealing with pain, chemo, hair-loss and uncertainty!” she explains. So, for 18 years now, she’s been encouraging people to face cancer, treating it as ‘work’; this is also why she wrote I Inspire (with Megha Bajaj) in 2015. “My greatest joy is being able to touch lives and to inspire people to never give up,” she says. 

Neerja believes that if you keep thinking of life as a war where you have to soldier on, you will end up, at some point, feeling battle-weary. She encourages us to see life the way her father has taught her to. She says,“On the day I was leaving for my first chemo session, he said, ‘ Beta , don’t fight life. You can never win that fight. Instead, face it.’ I took that advice to heart. No situation scares me anymore!”

Neerja has 26-year-old twins, Shivani and Sidharth, and this Christmas marks the 38th anniversary of her marriage with Mandeep. She feels her entire life is a miracle! “Har Waqt Shukran (Be grateful in each moment) – this is Neerja’s mantra. She vows that gratitude is the password to happiness! Her parting line, as she hugs me tight, sums up her spirit, “ Hameysha Khush Raho! Mein Khush! Ranga Khush! Mogambo Khush! Sab Log Khush (This is a variation of a Punjabi saying and basically means — Always be happy! For it really, really, pays to be happy!” 

The writer is a life coach, happiness curator and author of Fall Like A Rose Petal. You can reach him through his blog avisviswanathan.wordpress.com