When I was a child, I came across a copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People among my father’s books. I don’t know if my father ever read it but ours was certainly not the only Indian home to have the book. At the time I didn’t realise it, but I had stumbled upon my very first self-help book.
That book was originally written in 1936 in the middle of the Great Depression. In hindsight, one can see its appeal in an America in the grip of a terrible economic downturn. It sold the idea that you could somehow bootstrap your way out of the mess.
Self-help books promise a secret formula to individual success, an irresistible lure for those who feel powerless against huge economic forces. But self-help stories also need a charismatic salesperson with a great life story, preferably one that follows the rags-to-riches pipeline.
Self-help megastar Jay Shetty is now being accused of having fabricated or exaggerated parts of his life story. The story as put out by Shetty is that he grew up in an Indian family in the UK, went to a lecture by the monk Gauranga Das because his friend promised to take him to a bar afterwards, saw the light and lived several years in an ashram in India. Then he decided instead of becoming a monk, his mission was to share that wisdom far and wide. The likes of Michelle Obama and Oprah Winfrey appeared on his podcast On Purpose, one of the 10 most-subscribed to podcasts in the US last year. Jennifer Lopez was so impressed by him she had him officiate her wedding with Ben Affleck. No wonder people pay thousands of dollars to attend the Jay Shetty Certification School’s online course.
Who would not want to have a Shetty life?
Now an expose in The Guardian notes Shetty didn’t quite stumble upon Eastern mysticism. He grew up in a Hare Krishna family. He has been accused of plagiarism and using people’s content without attribution. The Guardian says most of the time he says he spent at an ashram in India was actually in Bhaktivedanta Manor, a Tudor estate outside London making YouTube videos.
Shetty’s lawyers are trying to refute The Guardian’s allegations. But there is no evidence yet that his most high-profile followers have dumped him. Whether Shetty’s life story had a lot of holes in it or not, it does not mean people don’t want the life he created for himself.
The real appeal of a self-help book is the agency it pretends to confer upon you. Self-help gurus do that by claiming they have a 1-2-3 step-by-step guide to whatever you need. It might be a slimmer you, a richer you, a more confident you or a you that lasts longer in bed. In short, a happier you. It also promises the way to that person who is there inside you. You just need the guru’s secret key to unlock it. As a boy, I wanted to be a taller me. I wrote to some address in Karol Bagh, New Delhi for a self-help guide on how to grow taller in six months. I got a sheaf of xeroxed exercises in the mail. They didn’t work.
However, the lure remains. Shetty had an added advantage — his cultural origin. For long, the West has preached the mantra of individualism to the East. Indians have swallowed that hook, line and Dale Carnegie. Then disaffected Westerners, fed up with the relentless pursuit of materialism, came looking for the meaning of life in the East. Now, we have the Jay Shettys who have turned that Eastern spiritualism into a self-help commodity which they peddle back to the West, for example, through his latest bestseller, 8 Rules of Love, which explores four “Vedic” stages of love (with simple exercises).
The irony is that self-help is predicated on a firm belief in individualism. But the guru promises that each of us can become like him or her if we only follow their course, no matter how different we are as individuals. We can all become Smarter, Better, Faster and eventually Superbetter once we know The Secret.
But it’s the self-help gurus who know the real secret about us. They understand that behind the constant pressure to upgrade our phones and gadgets lies a relentless anxiety that we are the ones who need to really upgrade. We may snicker at Shetty but that does not change our basic fear of inadequacy, and the hope that we can fix it somehow with a simple life hack.
In 1936, Dale Carnegie was teaching us how to win friends and influence people. In 2024, when every other person wants to be a social media influencer, nothing has really changed. Except now we are really looking to win not friends but followers.
Roy is a novelist and the author of Don’t Let Him Know
