The Magnet of Misery
In the quiet lane behind the old Hanuman temple in Dehradun lived Baba Samaranand, retired electrical engineer from Bharat Heavy Electricals, self-certified philosopher, and part-time therapist who charged nothing but asked for total surrender to his “methods”. People called him “Baba Magnet-wale” because he had a bowl full of fridge magnets shaped like laughing Buddhas, OM signs, and one suspiciously obscene dancing Shiva that he swore was “pure tantra”.
One monsoon afternoon, a man stormed in wearing a safari suit two sizes too tight, face redder than a Diwali lantern.
“Babaji!” he shouted, “I am Vinod Tandon, branch manager, Punjab National Bank, Sector 17. My life is finished! My BP is 180/110, my wife has stopped cooking paneer, my daughter wants to marry a boy who makes YouTube videos about cryptocurrency, and yesterday the ATM swallowed my own debit card! Tell me, Babaji, is mercury retrograde or have I offended Shani-dev in my previous birth?”
Baba Samaranand was drinking tea from a steel glass that had “Best Employee 1998” printed on it. He looked at Vinod over the rim, slow as a lizard.
“Arre Tandon-sahib, sit. First remove your shoes, they are leaking tension on my floor.”
Vinod sat, sweating.
Baba opened his wooden Godrej cupboard, took out a bright red horseshoe magnet, and placed it in Vinod’s palm.
“Hold this.”
Vinod stared. “That’s it? I came from Chandigarh for a magnet?”
“Shh. Close fist. Feel the pull.”
Vinod closed his fist. “Nothing is pulling.”
“Exactly,” Baba smiled. “That is the whole point. The world is pulling you from all sides, wife, daughter, ATM, cryptocurrency damad. But this magnet is pulling nothing. For ten minutes daily, you sit with it and tell it your problems. It will listen quietly. No advice, no judgement, no forward of good-morning messages. Just listening.”
Vinod looked doubtful. “But Babaji, this is just cognitive behavioural distraction, right?”
Baba’s eyes widened in admiration. “Arre wah! You also read WhatsApp University psychology groups? Good, then you already know it works. Now go, complain to the magnet, not to your liver.”
Vinod left, slightly confused but lighter.
Three weeks later he returned, looking ten kilos thinner and suspiciously cheerful.
“Babaji, miracle! BP is 130/85, wife made paneer twice, daughter’s boyfriend has only 40,000 subscribers so I have postponed my heart attack, and the bank gave me new card with extra cashback. Your magnet is dev-amaan!”
Baba waved his hand. “Magnet is duffer, yaar. You just stopped short-circuiting your own brain.”
Next came Mrs. Shukla, chemistry teacher from St. Joseph’s, famous for making class 10th boys cry with her mole-concept sarcasm.
“Baba, I can’t sleep. Every night I calculate how many children have ruined their future because they confuse valency with validity. I wake up at 3 a.m. shouting ‘Avogadro!’ in my dream.”
Baba listened patiently, then disappeared into his little courtyard and returned with a small tulsi plant in a broken coffee mug.
“This is Tulsi Devi version 2.0. Your new daughter.”
Mrs. Shukla frowned. “I already have one tulsi outside my house.”
“That one is on autopilot. This one is on manual mode. Your job: keep her alive. Not too much water, not too little. Morning sun till 11, then shade. Talk to her in Hindi, she hates English medium.”
Mrs. Shukla laughed despite herself. “You’re giving me a plant instead of sleeping pills?”
“Sleeping pills have short cut. Plant has no short cut. Every day you will wake up thinking ‘Did I kill Tulsi Devi today?’ By the time you finish checking her soil, your brain will be too tired to torture you with mole concept. Nature’s own CBT.”
Mrs. Shukla took the plant like it was made of glass.
Six months later she sent Baba a Rakhi made of tulsi leaves and a card: “Tulsi Devi now has 47 children (cuttings). I sleep like Kumbhakaran. Thank you for upgrading my motherboard.”
Then came the grand finale: young Arjun, software engineer, 27 years old, 27 tabs open in brain.
“Baba, I have decision paralysis. Startup or Google? Arrange marriage or Tinder? Keto or rice? I overthink so much I forgot my own Wi-Fi password.”
Baba looked at him sadly. “Beta, you are trying to take short cut to life. Life has no Ctrl+Z.”
He thought for a long time, then went inside and returned with… nothing.
Arjun panicked. “No magnet? No plant?”
Baba shook his head. “For you, I have a task that even Google cannot optimise.”
He pointed to a rusty iron trunk in the corner. “Every morning at 6 a.m. you will come here, open this trunk, take out one old photograph, look at it for five minutes, try to remember the story behind it, then put it back exactly the way it was. No phone, no music, no short cut.”
Arjun opened the trunk. Inside were hundreds of faded photographs: someone’s wedding, someone’s first bicycle, a group of engineers in bell-bottoms holding a “400 kV line energised” banner.
“Whose photos are these?” Arjun asked.
“Mine, my friends’, strangers’ who left them here over twenty years. Some dead, some forgotten. You will never know the full story. That is the point. You will sit with mystery that has no closure, no LinkedIn profile, no resolution. Your overthinking engine will sputter and die because it has nothing to optimise.”
Arjun came every morning for three months. One day he arrived with a big grin.
“Baba, I have stopped overthinking.”
“Good!”
“I joined my father’s hardware shop in Roorkee. Cash only, no UPI, no decisions, no keto.”
Baba looked shocked. “Arre! That is too much offline, beta!”
Arjun laughed. “No short cut, Baba. You said.”
Baba hugged him. “Accha, at least update the shop’s WhatsApp DP once a year.”
Years passed. Baba Samaranand’s veranda became famous. People came with anxiety, left with magnets, plants, old photographs, sometimes just a safety pin he asked them to count every day (“there are exactly 108 grooves, no more, no less”).
One evening, a foreign lady journalist arrived with a big camera. “Sir, BBC wants to do a story: ‘The Indian Guru Who Heals With Fridge Magnets’.”
Baba offered her tea in the Best Employee 1998 glass.
“Madam, I am not guru. I am only retired electrical engineer. I know one thing: current always takes path of least resistance. Human beings also want least resistance. Anxiety is high-resistance path. I give tiny low-resistance loops, magnet, plant, photograph, so current calms down.”
The journalist smiled. “So placebo?”
Baba grinned, showing paan-stained teeth. “Placebo, placebo-effect, placebo-wallah, whatever. As long as the fuse doesn’t blow, who cares about the brand name?”
She asked for a magnet to take home.
Baba gave her the obscene dancing Shiva one.
“Careful, madam. This one has extra tantric pull.”
She laughed all the way back to London.
And in the quiet lane behind the Hanuman temple, Baba Samaranand kept his bowl of magnets ready.
Because some problems need surgery, some need medicines, and some just need a small, ridiculous task so the mind stops short-circuiting itself.
After all, as he liked to say, “In the grand 440 kV transmission line of life, sometimes all you need is a little grounding.”
