Friday, September 11, 2009

Someone wise once told me that if we focus our efforts in giving our best shot at all that we do, the results will show for themselves. I understand now that for a 16 year old writing THE all important board exam along with thousands of others, it was great advice. Because then, everyone is judged by the same yardstick. Everyone was doing the same 5 or 6 things, reading the same 10 or 11 books.

Now, some x years later, I realize I have been hanging on to advice that should have been left behind, along with board exams and school. Because in the real world, everyone is not doing the same thing. Everyone is working at chipping away their own and unique bit of rock, hoping to hit the jackpot. Or is that why they are hitting the rock?

Everything is not simply black or simply white it seems. Most of the time I know exactly where I am and exactly where I will be. But sometimes when this neat scheme is given a hard shake and all the colours flow into each other, flowing and mixing, I get shaken too. Sometimes I succeed in making sense of the mayhem; sometimes I don’t.

It’s agonizing, this intermittent dip into blur-dom.

4 comments:

Mihir said...

1. This post made me smile :)

2. What happened to the cool blue theme?

Nivedita said...

@Mihir:
1. I'm glad it did :) Maybe one day I will also read it and smile, like I do now when I read about my school days..
2. The cool blue thing was screwing up the formatting coz it was an old Blogger template. So I shifted to a new Blogger template. No more formatting headaches.

Unknown said...

One of the coolest/wisest things I've read of late.

Hari said...

So the question really is -

1. Would it be fair to judge everyone on the same level and the same parameters and allocate success accordingly

or

2. Would it be fair to throw everyone in a chaotic environment posing random challenges where success is determined by no particular combination of factors or skillset

Personal opinion: The seemingly random and unfair nature of life is what makes it a level playing ground for everyone and therefore - fair to everyone, but fair to no one person or individual