The Monk Who Laughed All the Way to the Bank!. Review on The Monk Who Sold His Ferrari - Robin Sharma

My darling husband works very hard. He also has the biggest collection of self help books, in virgin condition, this side of the Vindhyas; these are usually given to him as birthday presents by mostly well meaning folks in his life. (Ever noticed how people are too ready to hand out self help books when they think you don't work 'hard enough', and how eager they are to do the same when they think you work 'too hard', and so need to get a life which follows their expectations?)

One recent gift was the much hyped bestseller “the Monk Who Sold His Ferrari” by Robin Sharma.

This book is a classic case of over-promising and under-delivering. The story tells of a greedy overweight, womanising lawyer who drops to the ground in a faint in the courtroom in the middle of a high profile case (by this time you already hate him so much you don’t even feel sorry for him), and then disappears from the scene, to the Himalayas, (we are told later.) He surfaces again clad in a red robe, slim, incredibly smooth skinned, blissful (sure, I would be blissful too – if I had a few millions stashed away in my bank, while I went on exotic Himalayan holidays and stayed in cottages made of red roses - Ananda here I come!) and only too eager to spread the goodness of the profound truth that has changed his life forever.

This ‘profound truth’ is so cliché ridden and is dished out in such a self-important manner, that you wish Robin had written him dead on the courtroom floor.

There is nothing new in Robin Sharma’s book - it is a mishmash of Hindu, Buddhist, and every other eastern philosophy one can think of.

For example, there is this well known koan which tells of a professor who goes to a famous monk and asks him to teach him Zen. The monk invites him to first have a cup of tea. He places a cup before the professor and keep pours tea into it till the cup fills and overflows. The completely puzzled professor asks the monk, "Why are you still pouring tea? Don't you see the cup is already full?” The monk replies, "Exactly. How can I teach you Zen when,just as this tea cup is, you are so full of yourself."

Robin takes this story and twists it to make it his protagonists own. The ex-lawyer (now monk) starts the process of making his friends life better by pouring tea all over his Persian carpet.

The analogies that this book is stuffed with are equally annoying and childish in the extreme. When he asks the reader to use sumo wrestlers, shiny gold watches, pink wire cables (!) and winding pathways of diamonds as symbols of the ‘high’ life, one wonders what exactly his estimation of his readers' intelligence is!

Of course this book is not hopelessly beyond redemption – it has its good points. He says

- Dare to dream that you are more than the sum of your circumstances.

• You are building your destiny because only you decide how do you react to what happens to you.

  
  




• The only limits on your life are the ones you set yourself.

  
  

Unfortunately these are so few and buried so deep amongst excruciatingly boring and simplistic use of genuinely inspiring philosophy that one is far better off throwing this book in the trash and reaching out for Lao Tsu, The Bhagvad Gita, Leo Buscaglia, Paramahamsa Yogananda, and even Dale Carnegie, all sources Mr. Sharma has freely borrowed from. Or maybe you could just spend more time talking to your grandmother.

Seriously, you don’t need to wade through this literary mess to learn that you need to eat healthy, exercise regularly, and balance your professional and personal life.

If you want an inspiring fable, read The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho. If you want practical guidelines to good living, read The Prophet by Khalil Gibran. If you simply want to see how smooth talking salesmen laugh all the way to the bank by exploiting Indian and Eastern philosophies, read The Monk by Robin Sharma.