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.
Do comment under, and be honest and blatant :-)
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| Happened to find this class picture from the same class |
