India now has its newest motivation guru. Go to him asking how to sell ice to Eskimos and he’d put: “Why sell ice to Eskimos when you can sell life jackets to drowning men!”

He is Jaswin Jassi, already featuring in the mighty Limca Book of Records. You may recall him as the most familiar face on Doordarshan for over two decades.

Jassi is just out with his book - Have Guts..!! Those who claim to have benefitted from his lectures and the book say Jassi is always ready with immediate solutions. “He gives instant responses, he drives you to a new thought process. He’s one who converts a negative into a positive, he’s one who makes impossible possible and he’s one who turns dreams into realities,” says Sunil Chaturvedi, a media expert.

According to Jassi, ‘Have Guts…!!’ focusses on the life and times of a boy from the Indian capital city of Delhi - his failures and successes, his grief and joy, his dreams and realities, his irritations and calmness, as also his edginess and pushiness. The straight-from-the-heart real stories written with very simple style and admirable honesty portray the variety and colour of a person’s life, so much so that one can associate with the boy in the book, he promises.

The boy, who progresses to become a man, could be living anywhere in the world. Reading about him is sure to bring back lot of old memories, he claims, adding there are unforgettable stories for everyone in the book.

“If I manage to connect with even one of my readers, if I manage to guide some to a life less ordinary or make them realise that all’s never lost, all the effort will be worth it,” says Jassi. Why not, when for most of us, failure often brings shame, a feeling of inadequacy, and even rejection. Failure is one of the topics we don’t like to think about much less talk about. Most people also do not take any risks for fear of failure. “But,” he says, “where would we be if everyone who feared failure refused to take risks?”

True, history is full of people who failed but their failures often led them to even greater successes. In ‘Have Guts…!!’, the protagonist grows up to face the storm in the eye and paves his own path. Despite being treated as a misfit by his parents and siblings, he doesn’t lose hope and stares adversity in the eye, taking up every challenge circumstances throws at him. He fails some of course, but with each failure he learns. Athletes fail, but the truly great ones strive harder to win the next time. Buildings and bridges that collapse under stress are redesigned to newer and better standards. Scientists spend much time documenting failure after failure before discovering the cure that will save many lives and ‘Have Guts…!!’ teaches how to cash in on failure, how to turn failure into an opportunity for success.

Probably, Jassi is the first Indian author to write a book without having read one. “I’ve never read a book my entire life, so writing one was completely out of question. Or so I thought. It so happened that an ordinary lunch meeting with friends turned into an extraordinary affair. To kill time, I decided to let them in on a few incidents that happened in my life. Kind of like a story telling session, just that the stories they were hearing, were all true. I was talking about my life after all,” his foreword reads. Oh! Jassi may not have intended to make a full-fledged career out of writing books, but the success of ‘Have Guts…!!’ is sure to make him think twice.

Jassi lives in New Delhi, India. His email is jaswinjassi@gmail.com and he can be reached at 9811162061.