Monday, November 26, 2007

Hitch Hiker!

This is what I promised to pull out from my notes for TYS. My posts got deleted while I was experimenting a bit with the blog... Dont you ever trust an engineer to sit silent without fiddling around! :P

I did resurrect the posts with some effort, but the comments are lost! :( But one comment from TYS was quite moving, the way his brother voluntarily shared his ice cream with a poor kid.

For me, being nice to people never was gifted so naturally... I really have to work hard to fight my natural instincts of putting myself first! So here we go with a little notes of what happened a few months ago.


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A school kid waved his hand while I was driving my car back from tennis court to my house. I pulled my car to the side. He said "Anna... can you drop me till the end of this road?" - I smiled and he hopped in. Few minutes with him, he was off and I continued driving towards home.

This kid reminded me of an incident that happened when I was very young. I was in my 3rd or 4th class back then. I used to walk to my school. At school we were expected to carry an extra set of shoes for sports. Sports were compulsary every evening and I started walking back after a game of football.

I crossed the rail track and then a kid (of my age or probably younger) was following me. I looked at him and said "what do you want?" - he stared at the transparent cover I was holding with my leather shoes in them. He said "I want to wear them once... I want to know how they feel". I said "Ok. Take it" - I stretched my hand as if I would allow him to wear them and while he was about to take them... I pulled it back! And I started laughing and mocking at him. I abused him, reminding him that he was a poor guy and he should never dream of such things in life!

I trotted back home, not realizing what I did. I went home, and while having evening snax, I called my mom ( I used to call her amma back then .. dont know when I switched to this stupid mummy ) and told her with my head held high - "you know what I did today?". She looked back as if to say "ok .. come on tell me".

"I had fun amma. This dirty beggar kid, he wanted to wear my shoes. I told him I will give it to him, but I did not and I enjoyed making fun of him". She did not know how to react.

She made me search for my old shoes and told me "he wanted to try your shoes... I want you to gift these to him and come". She shouted "Go, find him!" She made me realize that not everyone gets everything and you should respect people. She just said "its ok if you did not want to give him anything, but thats not the way you treat him!"

I went to a very affluent school (a recent survey says its ranked seventeenth in India and the best in south India) and when I never knew that a world of poverty existed outside. I think this one incident was a very big turning point in my life in terms of how I looked at the world around me.

I trotted back carrying my old pair of shoes, trying to locate this kid. I searched frantically, but I never found him. Dejected I returned back home. I was very moved by this incident. The fact that I remember it after 2 decades, tells me how important that incident was. It came at the cost of a little sweetheart, but it changed my world!

Not very far from this incident was when I thought I did the world's smartest thing. My school teacher was taking a spelling test in the class. I could commit to memory most of the spellings. This "charminar" somehow proved a little difficult. I wrote it on a piece of paper and slipped it into my 'pencilbox'.

The test was over, I scored well. I went home and showed the results to my dad. And I told him about the smart thing that I had just done. I said "everyone else was working hard to memorize, and I just wrote it on a piece of paper!" - at that time I did not even know that this process was called "cheating in the exam" - I thought I invented something 'cool'. Dad just got up, and I had a thrashing of my life that day. He said "if you ever cheat again, i will throw you out!".

I was very confused, because 2 minutes ago he was all smiles. And suddenly he became violent. And it was so rare that he ever beat me up. We were always the pampered kids! And I did not understand how that was "cheating". It took time and he explained to me later once he calmed down, that I should work hard for results. This is cheating because it was not fair to others!

Another incident which changed my life in the childhood - for good or bad - I stuck to the truth for a long time in my life. I never cheated in school again. There were others in my class who probably shared a 100% marks along with me in subjects like physics, maths and computers... but I openly used to say "my 100 is more valuable than yours...bcoz I earned it the right way!" Such statements made me unpopular sometimes, but I loved sticking to what I believed. To live an honest life!

Now somewhere down the lane, I know I lost all my principles. I have cheated. I have cheated and I have learnt the art of rationalization. I lied too - sometimes for the good and sometimes for my own selfish reasons.

I could not stop recalling these little incidents when I saw this hitch hiker. How I wish someone slapped me right on my face and tell me everytime I even dared to do anything wrong!

It is amazing that your minds are so impressionable at young ages. With in half hour, you could wipe out a wrong thought and replace it with such a noble feeling. It takes so much longer now though and probably sometimes you never learn too! Thats what 'growing up' does to you!

6 comments:

Tys on Ice said...

tht was a beautiful post...i got so badly beaten once for ' borrowing' a 25pc from top of the almariah, by amma. I had used it to buy lemon sweets for all the kids who used to walk to school with me...the stupid ayah praised abt this to amma and the beating ensued...never stole again...:)

isnt it strange that our inate nature is rather abhorant? and tht morals, values, kindess etc are all induced qualities?

Raghu said...

@tys
never stole again?
stealing hearts is also a crime! ;-) and I see you steal a lot of hearts on your blog! :)

innate nature is programmed by our instincts for self-survival... it is scary. May not be that strange if you look at evolution of man! It *was* important for him to be self-serving to survive in those cave-man days!

And yes to induce the 'good' qualities on top of that rather raw and unsophisticated interior requires courage to accept your shortcommings, sincerity to work on them and persistence to walk uphill!

There are no free lunches! No luck... plain hard work! :)

aMus said...

your comments are as long as your posts now...:p

nice post...its getting a bit difficult to pass on values and ,morals to the kids tho..white lies are very common...

just a thought which came to mind... oue epics are also faulty...our mahabharath has a woman 'married' to 5 men, the ramayana has its flaws too...

Raghu said...

@ta

hmmm... may be .. may be not...

our epics were written based on what was right and wrong at that age!

Married to 5 men and other messages in Ramayana may seem to be flawed when viewed with the lenses of current civilization and culture.

For example, division of labour was a fantastic idea... but it unfortunately turned out to loose its original intent and gave way to the opressive caste system.

To blame the original founders of 'division of labour' is probably not correct! :)

My humble feeling is that there are very few aspects that stand the test of time! Everything else will have to be looked at based on the prevailing norms in the society at that point of time! :)

on a lighter note... i wonder how someone could manage more than one spouse in any era! Comeon... managing one itself is such a big art! ;-)

And ... on the kids inculcating good values... dont worry too much about it.. i believe each generation is better than the previous one! It apparently looks different on the surface... Am sure our parents thought that we were loosing our values... but I think we feel as strongly as they do when it matters!

so our kids are going to be much more sophisticated and will have even stronger value system than what we can ever teach them! :)


And here we go... yet another comment as long as the post! :)

aMus said...

well said...

there are two sides to everything, depends on how you look at it...btw..that was a comment made by a friend's daughter so it struck me that this was how the epics were being viewed by the next gen...

**managing one itself is such a big art** :)...is it that difficult?

Raghu said...

@ta
well... depends on who that 'one' is! ;-)

If 'one' refers to the 'hubby', its no big deal to manage him... no complications, no emotions, no unpredicatibility.. everything is simple, straighforward and rational! ... :P

If that 'one' refers to the 'wifey', then lets not even talk about it.

just for sample:
You ask chutney with breakfast, then you are burdening her more... and if you stop asking then it is "i know mom and mom-in-law are better at making chutneys than me! And hence you dont ask!"

Does that answer your question? :P