99 Not Out! by Dr Sujata Kelkar Shetty COUNTRY SQUIRE MAGAZINE

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BY THE EDITOR

The bookshops sag with promises these days. Shelf after shelf of bright spines shouting cures, secrets, revolutions. Most are lies. Some are dangerous. A few might keep you alive a little longer.

I met the good doctor on Zoom—her face calm on the screen, mine carefully framed to hide the humidor in the glass cabinet behind me. She had the look of someone bright who’d seen cells divide under pressure, who’d watched stress eat at living tissue through the cold eye of a microscope. At the NIH in Bethesda, they train their people to see what others miss. She saw enough to write this book.

Dr. Sujata Kelkar Shetty did her post-doctoral training at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) in Bethesda, Maryland. That’s where she studied stress, cells, and the body’s slow unravelling under pressure. It’s the kind of place where breakthroughs happen, where the language of longevity gets written in data and peer-reviewed papers. When a scientist has NIH credentials, you listen. It means rigour. It means credibility. And in 99 Not Out!, that rigour meets real life—no waffle, just evidence.

Dr. Sujata’s book doesn’t beg. It doesn’t preach. It states facts cleanly, like a scalpel makes incisions. A myriad of ways to outwit time. Some will suit you. Others won’t.

“The modern world with its digital devices and far too many hours spent being sedentary indoors will make us sick unless we choose habits that support our well-being.”
— Dr. Sujata Kelkar Shetty

The modern world is dying strangely. Hearts give out younger here. Minds fray faster there. Stress works its poison quietly, like dry rot in good timber. Dr. Sujata has watched it happen at the cellular level. Now she tells you how to shore up the beams before the collapse.

A woman who studied stress before it became the defining malady of our age, Dr. Sujata writes not with the dry detachment of a researcher but with the quiet urgency of someone who has seen what time does to the body and knows there are ways to slow its march. 99 Not Out! is not a manifesto. It is not a fad. It is a book for those who want to live long but, more importantly, live well.

Dr. Sujata speaks of Ayurveda like an old friend, Yoga like a discipline, Western medicine like a tool—not opposing forces but pieces of the same puzzle. “I don’t know of any book in the market like this one that takes a holistic view on living well and long in a scientific and evidence-based manner,” she says. “Or a book that combines the latest in western medical knowledge with the ancient wisdom of Ayurveda.” There are twenty-nine principles here, twenty-nine ways to cheat the clock. Some will work for you. Some won’t. She doesn’t promise miracles. She promises sense.

How best to summarise Dr. Sujata’s findings?

The world is sick in new ways now. Diabetes, heart disease, depression—they come earlier, they come faster. Indians, she says, get heart attacks a decade before others. Stress is the silent killer, the rust on the gears of the body. And so she writes about healing, about balance, about the small, daily acts of defiance against decay.

This is a practical book. It does not soar with poetry. But there is a kind of beauty in its clarity, in its refusal to peddle false hope. Dr. Sujata lives in Bangalore with her husband, her sons, and two retrievers named Google and Brad. The dogs, she says, saved her sanity in the pandemic. She’s grounded. You believe her. You believe this book could save yours.

Perhaps most striking is Dr. Sujata’s reflection on our modern relationship with mortality: “Death has become anomalous to life in modern living,” she observes. “While it is an intrinsic part of life, we shield ourselves from it. We haven’t witnessed it as often as the generations before us.” This peculiar disconnect, she suggests, may explain why our generation has become the most fearing when facing life’s final threshold.

If you are tired of gurus and quick fixes, if you want something steadier, something that feels true—read this book. Then go for a walk. Breathe. Choose one of Dr. Sujata’s very doable principles—like “sleep enough at night and take an afternoon nap if you can”—and follow it. See what happens. Maybe choose one more, and so on.