Skip to main content

A little bit of you



We encounter a lot of people in our day to day life. Quite many of them leave traces of themselves somewhere in our psyche. Some create ripples on the surface and vanish. Deep impressions are left by a few. A handful may choose to leave scars too. A little bit of you lies within me and as much of me may lie within you too.

I remember hundreds of people who passed by me as colleagues or co-travellers, who sat with me as friends in my moments of grief and those who might have been victims of my associations with them. A little bit of them went into the making of what I am today. A little bit of you continues to add nuances to my psyche.

More often than not, we may not be aware of the bits and pieces of ourselves that we leave within others. As a teacher, I have had umpteen experiences of youngsters telling me how I influenced their thinking though I was never aware of the potential impact of certain things I said or did. Just the other day I received a series of messages on WhatsApp from a former student.

“I am used to this sort of a system in my life,” she wrote about yet another setback that had befallen her. Having reminded me of a very sad thing that happened to her at school, she wrote, “But then u were there to strengthen me or to tell me that sometimes we should love what comes our way and should not wish to get what we cannot have at all…”


Towards the end of her message, a smiley was embedded. I knew at once that the smiley was just a façade she had put upon her new sorrow. But I also knew that the smiley, a symbol of concealed pain, was in the right place because the girl’s message showed a wise acceptance of a certain situation which she couldn’t alter significantly because of given circumstances. “You are a wise girl and life will reward your wisdom one day. Best wishes.” That was all I could bring myself to write in response. Indeed her message revealed a wisdom beyond her age.

I went back on the memory lane to the days when I said a few words of encouragement or counsel to her. I never imagined that those words had magic in them. I never knew that I was reshaping the entire thinking of a youngster. I never realised how much of myself I was leaving within her.

I don’t think I did anything much for her in those days of her immense grief and confusion or later. I couldn’t help her to solve her problem since the solution lay beyond my control or power. All that I did was to help her make sense of what was happening to her.

As Vaclav Havel said, “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense regardless of how it turns out.”

When you can make sense of what is happening to you, of the agony imposed on you mercilessly by your destiny, the battle is won. I had learnt this from the long struggle I had as something more than a middle-age crisis. My excruciating struggles and the eventual little victories taught me a lot of lessons. Today I leave little bits of those lessons in the hearts of the youngsters who pass through my life at school. They leave similar bits of themselves in my heart too. The above-mentioned message which came from a person who is just turning to be eligible to cast her vote taught me much about the importance of the bits and pieces we leave in others.

PS. Written for Indispire:





For your copy, please click here


xZx

Comments

  1. Wow...came across such a wonderful post after quite some time. The post is full of everything that says that the life is worthwhile even after it being unreasonable at times. The students are lucky to have you as their teacher. Wonderful Sir!

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Thank you, Neeraj. Maybe I'm lucky to have such students.

      Delete
  2. So nice. Glad that your inspiring and positive words stayed with her...
    Great message.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. She is not a rare exception, Dr Anita. I've learnt that it's not difficult to influence young people. What we do with their impressionable minds is the question.

      Delete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Ayodhya: Kingdom of Sorrows

T he Sarayu carried more tears than water. Ayodhya was a sad kingdom. Dasaratha was a good king. He upheld dharma – justice and morality – as best as he could. The citizens were apparently happy. Then, one day, it all changed. One person is enough to change the destiny of a whole kingdom. Who was that one person? Some say it was Kaikeyi, one of the three official wives of Dasaratha. Some others say it was Manthara, Kaikeyi’s chief maid. Manthara was a hunchback. She was the caretaker of Kaikeyi right from the latter’s childhood; foster mother, so to say, because Kaikeyi had no mother. The absence of maternal influence can distort a girl child’s personality. With a foster mother like Manthara, the distortion can be really bad. Manthara was cunning, selfish, and morally ambiguous. A severe physical deformity can make one worse than all that. Manthara was as devious and manipulative as a woman could be in a men’s world. Add to that all the jealousy and ambition that insecure peo...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...

Bharata: The Ascetic King

Bharata is disillusioned yet again. His brother, Rama the ideal man, Maryada Purushottam , is making yet another grotesque demand. Sita Devi has to prove her purity now, years after the Agni Pariksha she arranged for herself long ago in Lanka itself. Now, when she has been living for years far away from Rama with her two sons Luva and Kusha in the paternal care of no less a saint than Valmiki himself! What has happened to Rama? Bharata sits on the bank of the Sarayu with tears welling up in his eyes. Give me an answer, Sarayu, he said. Sarayu accepted Bharata’s tears too. She was used to absorbing tears. How many times has Rama come and sat upon this very same bank and wept too? Life is sorrow, Sarayu muttered to Bharata. Even if you are royal descendants of divinity itself. Rama had brought the children Luva and Kusha to Ayodhya on the day of the Ashvamedha Yagna which he was conducting in order to reaffirm his sovereignty and legitimacy over his kingdom. He didn’t know they w...

Liberated

Fiction - parable Vijay was familiar enough with soil and the stones it turns up to realise that he had struck something rare.   It was a tiny stone, a pitch black speck not larger than the tip of his little finger. It turned up from the intestine of the earth while Vijay was digging a pit for the biogas plant. Anand, the scientist from the village, got the stone analysed in his lab and assured, “It is a rare object.   A compound of carbonic acid and magnesium.” Anand and his fellow scientists believed that it must be a fragment of a meteoroid that hit the earth millions of years ago.   “Very rare indeed,” concluded the scientist. Now, it’s plain commonsense that something that’s very rare indeed must be very valuable too. All the more so if it came from the heavens. So Vijay got the village goldsmith to set it on a gold ring.   Vijay wore the ring proudly on his ring finger. Nobody, in the village, however bothered to pay any homage to Vijay’s...

Dharma and Destiny

  Illustration by Copilot Designer Unwavering adherence to dharma causes much suffering in the Ramayana . Dharma can mean duty, righteousness, and moral order. There are many characters in the Ramayana who stick to their dharma as best as they can and cause much pain to themselves as well as others. Dasharatha sees it as his duty as a ruler (raja-dharma) to uphold truth and justice and hence has to fulfil the promise he made to Kaikeyi and send Rama into exile in spite of the anguish it causes him and many others. Rama accepts the order following his dharma as an obedient son. Sita follows her dharma as a wife and enters the forest along with her husband. The brotherly dharma of Lakshmana makes him leave his own wife and escort Rama and Sita. It’s all not that simple, however. Which dharma makes Rama suspect Sita’s purity, later in Lanka? Which dharma makes him succumb to a societal expectation instead of upholding his personal integrity, still later in Ayodhya? “You were car...