May 25, 2003

THE ‘for teenagers’ version of Who Moved My Cheese? was like one of those self-help books which try to explain profound truths in too simple a way. Change is inevitable, one must adapt to change, one perishes if one doesn’t, one should anticipate change and relish it and that those who seize the opportunities thrown up by change are those who are successful. Predictable cliches in stuccato fashion, things we already know but are easier said than done in real life, which is perhaps what makes them necessary to be repeated over and over again.

It all starts off with a change in a school’s timetable which throws over various students. How most resist the change, till one of them tells them the story of four creatures who lived off cheese in a maze. A predictably comfortable existence till the cheese suddenly disappears. The book then plunges into how the various characters adapt to the change.

How Haw’s feelings morph and grow — from at first denial, a paralysis to act, a refusal to believe things change, the fear of the unknown, of leaving the comfort of the familiar. His fear holds him back from searching for new cheese. Yet when he does set off on his ‘voyage of discovery’ the rush of new experiences, the bounding over his fears, give him a buzz till he realizes the flaws of his old existence — too predictable, monotonously stagnant and unchallenging.

Change does perhaps faze each one of us. To leave the comfortingly predicable to deal with new situations and to conjure up qualities from within to deal with them. But without the shoves of change we would be stuck in a groove and would never grow as individuals to discover our hidden strengths and weaknesses. Perhaps that is why life is an inexorable cycle of change. And if change is inevitable, its foolishness not to accept it and adapt to it. So learns Haw till he finally finds his new cheese, wiser in the process. Thus the children scrutinize their own behaviour in the light of the story.

The search for the cheese seemed to drag on too long and the cliches used to underscore points too pointed in the typical American fashion of catch phrases. Perhaps the book is at its most interesting when the children analyze themselves, how their clinging to the past or fears has hampered/is hampering their development. How Josh still refuses to be happy and accept the fact that his father left him, another girl used to refuse to make friends after moving to a new area. And finally how important it is in relationships to make changes. These points were however too briefly skimmed over.

The book is a twenty minutes whizz and does leave a few scattering of seeds of thoughts. But of things we know already.

 

Who Moved My Cheese

By Spencer Johnson

Putnam’s, New York. Available at Paramount Books, 152/O, Block 2, PECH Society, Karachi-75400. Tel: 021-4310030
 
Email: paramount@cyber.net.pk

ISBN 0-399-24007-1.

94pp. Rs695

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