A 52-week hyper-learning adventure

In 2018, corporate couple Eika and Siddharth Banerjee embarked on an exciting and a unique hyper-learning adventure: meet experts and specialists from various fields over 52 weeks to explore topics that help one enrich lives from all perspectives.

The result is "52 Red Pills", a book written as a practical guide that aims at helping people introspect and make them eager to know more about the different walks of life.

The primary motive of the exercise, the authors say, was "for us to learn and grow, and to use our learnings to become better versions of ourselves". Another objective was to "spend 'blocked-off' time as a couple on topics and conversations of mutual interest".

The book, with a subtitle that says "A New-Age Playbook to become Healthy, Wealthy and Wise", has interactive exercises and suggestions towards the end of every week that helps the readers write about their experiences and challenges.

The topics the authors chose were diverse as well as fascinating, covering a vast gamut of ideas and themes: from the art of making fine coffee to mind maps, from how billionaires think to how pro-marathoners train, from mindfulness to muay-thai, and from ancient medicine practices to cutting-edge haematology. This accelerated self-learning was a three-step process.

The Banerjees would speak to experts and hack into their life-journeys and learnings. They would then scan and absorb exciting literature on the subjects, thus building up an information database.

Finally, the couple would debate and discuss these concepts in great details between themselves to understand them. For 52 weeks of 2018, Eika and Siddharth explored and researched 52 topics that helped them enrich their lives from all perspectives, be it health, spiritual, professional or even leisure.

Their journey included topics of all kinds that are both intense and enjoyable. If one week, the authors learn about biohacking, the other they enjoy the different malts of whiskeys.

"Our journey was intense and hectic, covering a host of topics that would hopefully help us become 'healthy, wealthy, and wise', as we integrated learnings from ancient wisdom along with modern-day expertise," the say in the book, published by Pan.

To give themselves a breather from some of the more intense themes, they incorporated some lighter weeks in between, where they concentrated on experimental topics like whiskey, coffee, etc.