What a wonderful world 1.0

As kids, we learn the truth. The truth about life, knowledge, relationship, friendship, and many other things around us. However, we grow on to realize reality. Now many of you would be wondering isn’t the truth the reality. Well, the simple answer to this is no. Truth is made up of reality.

Let us take for example, that I tell you a story about my relationship with my parents, there will always be three sides to the story. My side, my parent's side, and reality. For me the truth is my side, for my parents, the truth is their side, however, the third side is the actual reality. With this article I mean to decode the reality from the truth that we have been taught.

Exploring the unexplored

No matter how strong you might consider yourself, there is always a part of us that we are too afraid to explore. Mostly the reality lies there. We live in a comfortable bubble which earlier our parents and other closed ones try to crate around us to protect us, and later in life instead of breaking free, we become so used to the bubble that we rather stay in than explore the world outside.

The first topic that I would like to touch upon is Success and Failure. Before you begin reading, take a pen and paper and write down what success and failure for you are. The maximum people would answer:

Success is achieving something and failure is not achieving it.

Well, this might be the truth but not the reality. Success is your determination to even try something, whether you achieve it or not will not define your success. As a kid, I was really shy. I liked to dance but only inside the bathroom or in front of my mom. Many times, my mom convinced me to actually dance at social gatherings and functions but I would hide behind her, making myself invisible.

After some time, my mom started to drag me to the dance floor and insisted that I should dance, holding my hand and moving them to make me comfortable. Well, that clearly did not work for me. Instead of starting to dance, I became so shy that I stopped dancing completely. I stopped going to social gatherings to save myself from the embarrassment, which made me so introverted, that I had a hard time even talking to my sister.

Phase 1

During my first phase, some people called me a failure, some said I was too dumb enough, and in just a split second and one action of not dancing, I was given at least 10 names. What people did not understand was that shy and introverted are not just words added to the dictionary to make it bigger, instead, they are actual feelings which one experiences. Instead of labeling success and failure to a kid dancing or not dancing, understanding the kid is a better option.

This journey of being timid and shy did not end there, in school too I had a hard time making friends and actually talking to people. I had a handful of friends at school, and if someday they were absent, I would end up having lunch alone all by myself. Being alone was not that bad, I had a lot of thoughts and imaginary friends who would accompany me everywhere and supported me instead of being judgemental about my nature.

My Life

Though I was a shy kid, I was good at studies, but that too only till class 2. In class 2 I won 20 prizes for academics. They were so many that my sister, first and I had to carry them. After I came home with all the prizes, all the labels given to me were suddenly lost and I came to be known as the Intelligent One.

I liked this name more than the previous one, and I thought was made up in my mind ‘ I was the intelligent one, and could do no wrong’. This overconfidence and pride of being ‘the intelligent one’ started to reflect in my studies, and from 20 prizes I went down to 3 to 1, and then for straight 6 years, I won nothing. My grades went down drastically and despite being ‘the intelligent one’ I had no clue what had gone wrong. The situation was so bad, that while in class 8 I failed my physics exam. The report card for the first time came with a red mark, which meant I had to reappear for the exam.

This was the first shock that I received. I realized maybe ‘the name’ is not enough, it takes more. All the holiday plans, birthday parties were canceled. The cable connection was cut, my parents sat me down for a good lecture, on how I had let them down. I sat all through my break preparing for the re-exam. I eventually managed to clear the exam, but the possibility of failing created a fear inside me, which did not go too soon.

I started to work hard towards my grades and in no time, I was again among the top 10 in my class. Never again did I see a red mark on my report card. In the board exams, I scored 90% and the celebration was extraordinary. On the result day, I was treated with lots of chocolates, my dad gifted me an expensive pen, the neighbors poured in congratulating me and each one was treated with a Samosa and Cold drink.

This was the day that I realized the truth about success and failure. Success gave you gifts, and failure gave you a good lecture followed by no holiday, no TV, and no parties. So now I wanted success for the gifts and praises. In short, I wanted to be successful for my parents.

College Time

This was followed by more exams and then finally college. Away from home among new people, I started to open up. Made new friends, had a lot of fun and started to explore my true self. The self that was lost in the aim to please my parents and get success, the self which I never knew existed within me. I explored event management, presentations, extempore and I was pretty good at it.

In this self-exploration I had forgotten about grades, while I didn’t fail this time, I didn’t do pretty well, and which made me go into self-doubt again of the next success test that was coming forth, ‘the placement’. Much to my amazement, despite being among the average students, I was the first to get placed in my batch. This was my first acquaintance with reality.