An Ounce of Appreciation

 

O King, I'm your court poet.

“An ounce of honey gathers more flies than a barrel of vinegar.” I think it was from one of those Dale Carnegie books that this sentence sprang straight into my face when I was a young man. The sentence carried all the tang and sweetness of honey for me. Until the flies in the sentence began to buzz around my thoughts. “Why gather flies?” I wondered.

That sort of wondering was a grievous error. You can’t win friends and influence people if you start wondering about the worth of flies. In fact, that little fly hovering above the stray zinnia that is growing on the side of the drain channel may have something vital to teach you. Nothing is insignificant. That is a fundamental axiom for success in life.

Appreciate the fly and the zinnia and even the drain. When Mahatma Gandhi exhorted us not to be drain inspectors, this is just what he meant: don’t look at the filth in the drain, see the zinnia instead. Discover the charms of the fly too, if you want to be one step ahead of the rank and file. Gandhi knew how to appreciate just the thing that mattered in every individual. That is precisely the point if you want to win friends and influence people.

Everyone has something good in him. Even the villains in the movies have it. It is easier to discover the shades of goodness in ordinary people than the movie villains. Just appreciate those shades of goodness and you will be amazed to see miracles unfolding. Gandhi did that: he trusted people’s potential for goodness and miracles followed.

And that is just what I could never bring myself to do. That inability of mine to trust humankind’s potential for goodness was a major hindrance in my personal development.

 As an older man, however, I employed the Gandhian strategy quite successfully among my students. Appreciate them for whatever good they do and they are sure to do better the next time. I believe that will work with adults too though not in the same way as it does with youngsters. When it comes to adults, I’m very wary and approach them with all the caution that I can muster.

The other day I saw what the Malayalam teacher had written on the board in the classroom. It was an example of simile from a Malayalam poem. It was the same example I studied some five decades ago. It went somewhat like this: “O King, your face shines like the moon.” When I saw that example again on a classroom-board, I couldn’t suppress a smile. Even the King loved appreciation. They loved flattery, in fact, which is quite a base thing. They appointed court poets just to flatter them and the above example, which is very lyrical in the Malayalam version of it, was a typical case of fatuous flattery. I wondered why Malayalam teachers couldn’t find a better example for simile even after decades. [As I said earlier, this sort of ‘wondering’ renders me incapable of being a disciple of Dale Carnegie’s ways of winning friends and influencing people.] Then it struck me that the need for appreciation is eternal, immortal, imperishable. When genuine appreciation does not come spontaneously, flattery takes its place.

The very word ‘genuine’ urges me to stop. I realise that I’m forcing myself to write this. This topic, appreciation, is a dichotomy for me. I value it but I can’t produce it genuinely in the world of adults. And I never learnt to say things like: “O King, your wardrobe possesses more variety than Cleopatra’s seductiveness.”

You see, some lessons are destined to remain unlearnt even if you want to learn them genuinely. But I know with my whole heart that an ounce of appreciation is worth an ocean of dialectic.

PS. This is the second part of a series, #MissedLessons. The first: Idealism vs Realism