Great Storytelling Network Newsletter – 7 June 2017

In today’s edition, I included ‘Canopy of Peace’ once again because many have written to me to say they enjoyed reading it. If you missed it the last time, here’s your chance to read it again. Rohi shares a piece about something that is new to me: chatbots. And there’s a new excertp from ‘Knowledge of Life’ about Diabetes. Finally, since I’m preparing a series of articles about helping people write their own tales, I thought I’d share a resource that appears to help people create an autobiography. I trust that you’ll enjoy this and other stories we’re sharing with you.

Happy storytelling.
Aneeta Sundararaj

This edition of the newsletter is sponsored by:

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The decision is made. Instead of taking a rickshaw or the car, we’ll walk. Rohi will lead the way to Shreyas restaurant that serves a Maharashtrian Thali. Although it is January, the mid-morning sun warms my back as we walk along Prabhat Road in Pune, India. As we amble along, cars, scooters, cycles and pedestrians race past. Perhaps, ‘race’ isn’t the right word. At most, they’re all going at 15 km per hour because the road is congested and choking with people, noise and smells.

There are squeals of laughter from children nearby. One man is selling vegetables by the roadside. A young girl on a scooter wraps one end of her dupatta around her head then expertly covers her nose and mouth. Once she puts on her sunglasses, there’s nothing of her face that’s visible and she’s completely protected from the pollution.

Since I’m meeting Rohi for the first time since my father’s death, it is natural this topic comes up during our conversation. He asks what my views are about death. I struggle to answer him because I’ve been so busy living that I haven’t thought much about dying. At least not about my own mortality. I tell him that what I have done for a long while now is to put systems in place to ensure that living is more manageable. I refer to a book I worked on, Yap Ming Hui’s ‘Set Yourself Free’ (http://howtotellagreatstory.com/2012/10/set-yourself-free-by-yap-ming-hui/) and we discuss this in some detail.

We arrive at the cross-roads and Rohi suggests we take the left lane. A while later, he takes a deep breath and responds to what I said.

To read more, please click here.

When Andrew Warner, founder of Mixergy, was 24 years old, he owned a company in Manhattan. The rent for the office space was a cool $1.2 million. One day, Andrew invited a direct mail marketer (let’s call him Johny) to his office to see what he could learn from him about direct mail that could be applied to email marketing.

When Johny saw that Andrew had a whole floor as his office in midtown Manhattan, he said, “Wow! Email built all this?” Later on, he admitted, “I missed email.”

Johny was great at direct mail marketing and he made a whole lot of money at it. But he got lazy and didn’t pay attention to email. By the time he realized his mistake, it was too late. He was too far behind. After he left, Andrew’s CFO said, “That was a splash of cold water. We could be that guy one day.”

Now we have to decide if we want to be like Johny. Because here’s the thing: Email marketing is in decline. Our email inboxes are flooded with hundreds, even thousands of unread email messages. More and more, we are ignoring email. It’s just too much. Your readers are no longer opening your emails, let alone reading them.

Also, people under 30 aren’t doing email as actively as before. They’re on messaging apps like Facebook Messenger—1.2 billion monthly active users and counting. People are spending more time on their messaging apps than their social media apps like Twitter and Instagram.

And the best way to communicate with them (and to build an audience) is with chatbots….

To read more please click here.

We believe that there are two types of diabetes: the first is where the patient acquires the diseases and this is called ‘Apathyanimittaja Prameha’. The second is where the patient is born with the disease and is called ‘Sahaja Prameha’.

One of my patients, Arun Jacob, didn’t seem to suffer from all the usual signs and symptoms of diabetes. Being over six feet tall, Arun weighed about 86 kilograms, which seemed reasonable. Suddenly, in the space of six weeks, his weight plummeted to 70 kilograms. As he had a family history of diabetes Arun went and had a blood test done.

“Dr. Siby, I almost fell off the chair when I read that my blood sugar level was 22,” he said when he came for his first consultation. “How can this be? I think it’s getting worse.”

I needed to know how far his disease had progressed and asked him a few questions. “Arun, when you go to urinate, what is the colour of the urine?”

“Er… I am not sure. I haven’t really looked.”…

To read more, please click here.

Description: How often have you wished you could understand how your body works? In Knowledge of Life: Tales of an Ayurvedic Practitioner in Malaysia, Vaidya C.D. Siby and Aneeta Sundararaj show you how. Through understanding the basics of the ancient medical system of Ayurveda, you will come to see how you can achieve and maintain good health for longevity. Far from being a textbook on Ayurveda, the elements of storytelling are used to feature some of the more common diseases among Malaysians. They range from obesity, thyroid disorder, diabetes, drug abuse and alcoholism to depression, cancer, stroke, eczema, psoriasis and subfertility. In each chapter, you will read about the disease, the common treatments the patient has undergone and how Ayurveda helped alleviate the signs and symptoms. An enlightening book, Knowledge of Life: Tales of an Ayurvedic Practitioner in Malaysia dispels the myths surrounding this ancient medical system.

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