P for Perspective

mylifeisnowhere

What did you read above? Was it- my life is no where? Or was it- my life is now here?

Beyond junior classes, as a student I was a disaster! And the magnitude of it kept scaling up. But one thing that has always worked to my advantage is my ability to look at situations with different perspectives. Perspective- this one eleven letter word has a wide meaning and holds tremendous value to it. It makes the difference of heaven and hell for the same given setting. Both logic and humour demand that the person dealing with them be able to look at facts with multiple angles and in different lights. No wonder people who have good sense of humour are smart! Being able to come up with a different perspective on the same situation may even lead you to see the positive side of a seemingly bad situation or come up with a significantly better solution, perhaps even a game-changer . It all depends on your standpoint on the given event. There is this famous story of two shoe salesmen who were sent to Africa to see if there was a market for their product. The first salesman reported back, “This is a terrible business opportunity, no-one here wears shoes.” The second salesman reported, “This is a fantastic business opportunity, no-one here wears shoes!” The point is when you begin looking at the same issue with a different thinking hat, you might just focus on the opportunity in difficulty than difficulty in the opportunity.

When I look back at my life, I see that somehow I had a natural propensity to question the employed rationality and sometimes have a differing view from the one presented. I was in a junior class when I noticed something on the educational notice board of our school. It read- “What’s in a name. By William Shakespeare”.  Even though I did not know the meaning of the term paradox, I could laugh at the contradiction in the sentence. There was another instance of my early schooling when I commented in our maths class that square is simply a special case of a rectangle, to which the teacher chided me and warned me against voicing my irrelevant and stupid thoughts in class. But the earliest instance I can recall is of when I was in a much junior class, maybe 1st or 2nd .My Hindi teacher, Chauhan mam, a very sweet lady who used to tell us fables to inculcate morals in us, narrated a story in class.

There was once a boy who, while entering his home at night, saw that the concrete water tank had a hole and water was flowing out if it. He realised that the seepage, if left unattended, would not only lead to the loss of all the water but might also damage nursery under it. He inserted his finger in the hole and stood there all through the cold night. In the morning when his mother realized what the boy did, she was proud of his dedication towards the house and also rewarded him for his dutiful behaviour. Hence the lesson we learn is that at times you need to do things that require will-power and sacrifice for family and others.

At the end of this story I asked her- “but mam...why did he stand there with his finger in the hole all night...he could have stuck a stick in it for the night, and then get it repaired the next day”. Some of my classmates were laughing, and many did not get it. As sweet as Chauhan mam was, she did not scold me or kick me out of the class as many of the teachers over the following years of my schooling did. In fact, she smiled to it. Though the idea of telling this story was to preach sacrifice and responsibility, but perhaps she too came to recognise the futility of the boy’s well-intentioned endeavour. Or maybe she was too kind to discourage a young mind questioning the way things go around. I too learnt something that day. Many a time in life one works very hard or does something rigorous and feel very content wherein actually that action perhaps was completely or partially unnecessary or could have been done in a smarter way, which is not necessarily tantamount to being lazy or foxily avoiding hard work. All it means is that one is smart enough to do it in a simpler way. When I was very young, people in our locality would fill their room coolers with buckets of water that they would carry all the way from their bathroom to the cooler...and then there were people who would simply use a pipe. This of course does not apply to places where doing the work in the traditional way would be of some value addition over the simpler alternative. Instead of solving the set of questions given by his teacher if a student simply copies them from internet then that would defeat the very purpose of the assignment. But if the work does not add any value as such and can be done in a simpler way, I see no reason why the efficient should not replace the traditional or prevalent.

Toh yaad rakho doston, zindagi mein har jagah ungli daal ke khade nahi ho jaana hota, kabhi kabhi lakdi fasa ke aage bad lena hota hai! Also, at times,you need not completely solve the problem then and there... just to fix it for then and move on to more pressing concerns :-)



Do comment under, and be honest and blatant :-) 

Happened to find this class picture from the same class