Flowers in the cemeteries

"I am the best." This was the slogan of one of my colleagues in Delhi. She taught this slogan to every student of hers with an indomitable spirit. Her students (who were my students too) tended to take it literally. Many of them behaved like absolute egotists who were entitled to the best of everything. She too possessed that sense of entitlement. She was a buoyant lady who knew how to play her cards deftly. No one could defeat her in the game of life. But she couldn't survive a catastrophe that came on her way. Her son died in a bike accident and that tragedy ate her away. She died a few months after her son's death.

She was the most positive-spirited person I ever knew. Obstacles were opportunities for her. She converted every obstacle into an opportunity to take out a new weapon from her inexhaustible armoury. For her, being 'positive' meant precisely that: being as aggressive as the wild boar while looking as cool as a lamb.

Whenever people speak about positivity, this lady springs in my consciousness with the agility of a dancer, the gracefulness of a motivational speaker, and the vehemence of the boar. She leaped from success to success. She was a successful principal of a big school in NCR when she succumbed to her personal tragedy.

She left me wondering again and again about the validity of her and other people's positive thinking strategy. I am a cynic. When I smell flowers, I look around for a coffin. Even today I find the best flowers stacked elegantly around a corpse placed in a coffin. Kerala is the land of irrepressible cynics, I think. They will present plastic bouquets to living people and real flowers to corpses.

The world of motivational books is similar to that. They are full of plastic strategies. They look good, sound good, and even work effectively - until the catastrophe strikes. The real flowers lie in coffins and cemeteries.

PS. Written for Indispire Edition 368: Is life as simple and promising as our motivational and self-help books think? #FacileOptimism

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