From the year 2016

As the dawn of the New Year is approaching at a blistering speed, I thought of penning down a crucial lesson that life taught me this year.

All of us have been endowed with the exact same 86,400 seconds in a day. In these seconds of life, the winners and losers, the audacious and the cowards, the champions and the mediocre are made. The only thing that matters ultimately in life is how we spend those great moments every day. This whole time period is irreversible, even a single second that you let go off through procrastination or any other trifle can never be retrieved in future. If you can tell me how you use those seconds every day, I can impeccably foretell you about your future because these minute seconds determine the greater future.

The paramount division in a winner’s usage of his time as well as a loser’s usage of time is about “investment of time”. Keeping it as tractable as possible, winners invest on themselves, their forte, their craft and losers spend the tantamount period on “others”. The preponderance of what I learnt this year is that, in the end nothing counts, no mark sheet, no evaluation certificate etc. The two things that are ample in making a difference in only life are:  what skills have you acquired veraciously and how you perceive yourself.

In this world, no evaluation but the one which has been prepared by your inner heart can actually arbitrate your true character. When I was in school, I spent my whole school life fighting a race. The race to be the best in class, the race to outshine others in the study and various other things in which I believed I was better than others. But like most others students, I could never unsnarl the real reason as to why I wanted to indulge myself in the race. I wanted to get a 10 CGPA but never thought why.

From the very beginning, the society has told us to differentiate each and everybody on just one basis. It has taught us to discern the toppers of the class, coaching institute etc. as the shining stars of tomorrow and to think of others as being the “less-privileged” in terms of mental IQ and to consider them as gangue. Each and every student who goes through the ordinary school procedure experiences the same notion. When we grow up, we don’t learn how to come out of this entangled net, but we actually learn to hide it by putting on an ostentatious face marred with ostensible reasons. As we move to higher classes, we start pretending as ranks don’t matter to us but the truth is that all of us are running behind ranks, running to outperform each other. This race is very much vital in terms of the function of a normal social society but is, in the same amount, detrimental to the athletes running in the race. What happens actually is that while running behind something that we don’t have a passion for, we lose over the novelty of thinking. After slogging for the first twelve years of life, we start toiling hard to pass in our colleges, then to get employed and after all these things, we realise the fact that we have done nothing in this great life which was given to us out of 1.2 billion other probabilities. We were accommodated with such a great life, but what “we” did to our life? We wasted it, doing no good to the society and doing no good to ourselves. We didn’t live this life; we just somehow survived those years.

You tried your best to live up to other’s expectations but in the end, you will find out that the only person, on whose expectations you couldn’t excel, is none other than you.  You lived your life fighting to become the number one in things which you never liked. You just did that because you didn’t want to forsake the race. You continued to run like a herd of sheep and the lion inside your heart could never come out. You always thought of becoming the best in other’s perspective but you failed yourself in your own perception. That’s because you did justice neither to yourself and nor to the world. You could have allocated so much to this world through your forte or the things, only you were dexterous at, but in the end, you chose to run in the race, you opted out to go and on, never reckoning about your happiness, never caring about your inner peace.

And in the end, the horrendous fact was that the race ended with no winner. The best athletes of the race were forgotten in a day or two and a new race was commenced again for the fresh recruits. The trap which we proudly dub as “life” was nothing more than a Ponzi scheme that would go on and on.

While you were running in the race, there were some who chose not to go further through the same way. They thought of carving out their own way. They were the ones who chose the formidable path of action. Though their path was difficult but they still persisted, they continued to perfect their craft, they carried on to do what “they” wanted to do. First, you mocked them and did your best to belittle them. You deemed as them a pariah, but in actuality, they were not the outcast but you were, in every sense, an obsequious follower of the bandwagon. And till the time you got to the middle point of the race, they had already achieved a far greater sense of life which is inexplicably cardinal.

Steve Jobs took the matter correctly and said, “The thing that you call life was invented by people no smarter than you.” Do you believe that the people, who were no smarter than us, can invent a system to take us to the heights of greatness? Not at all! They can only guide thy to an inconclusive race.

So my friend, stop going ahead in this desultory race. Think about contributing to the world through your talent, through your greatness and never be marred by mediocrity. Greatness is not any esoteric thing. It resides in all of us, we just need to look it more closely and specifically.

Now it’s on your to decide whether you want to flow like a guarded and coward sheep or roar like a lone but warrior lion.

JAI HIND, JAI BHARAT

JAI MA BHARTI