Skip to main content

Confessions of a Born Failure




Failure and I are twins.  We have coexisted happily for years now.  It wasn’t fun in the beginning.  The problem was that I never liked to fail.  So in those early years I did what one of the idioms in my mother tongue, Malayalam, describes as ‘roll where you fall’ meaning make your fall appear as not a fall but a roll that you chose.  However, eventually that becomes quite boring.  Moreover, the onlookers will understand your trick sooner than later. 

One of the fundamental and irrevocable truths of life is that people love losers.  Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves.  Another such truth is that it is easy to fail than succeed.  Ask the bulb man Edison who reportedly counted 10,000 failures on the way to illuminating the world with his bulb.  That was a neat number: 10,000.  Lucky man Edison was to get such a neat number of failures unless he was being metaphorical. 

I find James Dyson a greater consolation.  He gives us a more convincingly accurate figure of his failures on his way to the invention of the vacuum cleaner: 5126.  Dyson knew that failure was more natural than success.  Otherwise he wouldn’t have kept count of his failures.  But I guess he knew he wasn’t beating on a wall hoping that a door would materialise sooner or later.

I was also trying to create a door for myself.  Every time my door was about to take the final shape some mysterious force would come and decimate it.  The force didn’t come from some other world.  There was nothing supernatural about it.  I had a benefactor who convinced himself that whatever doors I created were not good for me.  Very, very few people, as far as I have understood, are as privileged as I am to have such a benefactor.  The benefactor is my twin.

Now I have got used to failures so much that any success would shatter me.  In fact, I feel a tremendous lot of gratitude to my benefactor for making me such a failure.  It is easy to fail.  It takes no effort.  Life is much smoother now. 

This is written for Indispire Edition 182 which asked the question what I would do when failures break me.  It is the question which made me realise how happy I was with failures. 



Comments

  1. Very nicely written.. loved it.. failures are the stepping stone for success....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Failures are the stepping stones to nirvana 😀 Or at least, what Lord Krishna called Nishkama Karma 😁😁😁

      Delete
  2. A motivational post! Even I considered myself invincible but have become wise enough to make friends with my failures. I am happy to roll wherever the downward slope is created. It feels weightless, I feel like a winner defying my weight, defying gravity or is it surrendering to it?

    Losing and occasonal winnings are something I consider as the inspirations for my blogs. Yes. That's how I treat it. Happily living my life through my blog. The outside world is just for the inspiration, one dives into it but for the moments when one needs the selfish need of words. Life is beautiful hence.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Only someone as cranky as I am can identify the motivational aspect of this post :)

      The present tendency to gloss over everything with "positive thinking" is a menace, I feel. People don't think because of that. Keats was right when he said that our sweetest songs are those that tell of saddest thoughts.

      Delete
  3. "Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves."

    That is so true..I can totally understand this :) A beautiful post Sir !

    ReplyDelete
  4. " One of the fundamental and irrevocable truths of life is that people love losers. Losers make people feel comfortable with themselves"- Interesting observation.... and a good post.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I make a lot of people comfortable with themselves :)

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Don Bosco

Don Bosco (16 Aug 1815 - 31 Jan 1888) In Catholic parlance, which flows through my veins in spite of myself, today is the Feast of Don Bosco. My life was both made and unmade by Don Bosco institutions. Any great person can make or break people because of his followers. Religious institutions are the best examples. I’m presenting below an extract from my forthcoming book titled Autumn Shadows to celebrate the Feast of Don Bosco in my own way which is obviously very different from how it is celebrated in his institutions today. Do I feel nostalgic about the Feast? Not at all. I feel relieved. That’s why this celebration. The extract follows. Don Bosco, as Saint John Bosco was popularly known, had a remarkably good system for the education of youth.   He called it ‘preventive system’.   The educators should be ever vigilant so that wrong actions are prevented before they can be committed.   Reason, religion and loving kindness are the three pillars of that syste...

Coffee can be bitter

The dawns of my childhood were redolent of filtered black coffee. We were woken up before the birds started singing in the lush green village landscape outside home. The sun would split the darkness of the eastern sky with its splinter of white radiance much after we children had our filtered coffee with a small lump of jaggery. Take a bite of the jaggery and then a sip of the coffee. Coffee was a ritual in our home back then. Perhaps our parents believed it would jolt our neurons awake and help us absorb our lessons before we set out on the 4-kilometre walk to school after all the morning rituals at home. After high school, when I left home for further studies at a distant place, the ritual of the morning coffee stopped. It resumed a whole decade later when I completed my graduation and took up a teaching job in Shillong. But I had lost my taste for filtered coffee by then; tea took its place. Plain tea without milk – what is known as red tea in most parts of India. Coffee ret...

The Real Enemies of India

People in general are inclined to pass the blame on to others whatever the fault.  For example, we Indians love to blame the British for their alleged ‘divide-and-rule’ policy.  Did the British really divide India into Hindus and Muslims or did the Indians do it themselves?  Was there any unified entity called India in the first place before the British unified it? Having raised those questions, I’m going to commit a further sacrilege of quoting a British journalist-cum-historian.  In his magnum opus, India: a History , John Keay says that the “stock accusations of a wider Machiavellian intent to ‘divide and rule’ and to ‘stir up Hindu-Muslim animosity’” levelled against the British Raj made little sense when the freedom struggle was going on in India because there really was no unified India until the British unified it politically.  Communal divisions existed in India despite the political unification.  In fact, they existed even before the Briti...

Truths of various colours

You have your truth and I have mine. There shouldn’t be a problem – until someone lies. Unfortunately, lying has been elevated as a virtue in present India. There are all sorts of truths, some of which are irrefutable. As a friend said the other day with a little frustration, the eternal truth is this: No matter how many times you check, the Wi-Fi will always run fastest when you don’t actually need it – and collapse the moment you’re about to hit Submit . Philosophers call it irony. Engineers call it Murphy’s Law. The rest of us just call it life. Life is impossible without countless such truths. Consider the following; ·       Change is inevitable. ·       Mortality is universal. ·       Actions have consequences. [Even if you may seem invincible, your karma will catch up, just wait.] ·       Water boils at 100 o C under normal atmospheric pressure. ·    ...