‘What did you learn?’ mom asks.
‘Nothing...’ he says frustratingly by putting his jacket on
the holder of a coat rack standing in a corner and he goes inside. The mother
watches him go and then looks at the jacket on the holder. ‘Is this my son?’
she keeps wondering as he goes inside. That is the first time he has tucked his
jacket perfectly up on the rack after returning home. He does this exceptional
thing and yet he says that he has learnt nothing. Isn’t that something he has earned
and he doesn’t even know?
There’s this scene from the famous Hollywood movie ‘Karate
Kid’ starring Jackie Chan (Mr. Han) and the little Jaden Smith (Dre) on the
television and there is this scene where the little boy, Dre is pissed off at
his supposedly kung fu teacher, Mr. Han. The khadoos teacher makes him take off his jacket and put it on a
holder and then again taking it off from there and wear and then repeat. He does
it for whole evening where as he keeps on hoping to learn some instant kung fu tactics
and could use them against the guys bullying him. But the poker faced master goes
on this tiring ritual in the name of teaching that he couldn’t realise the
reason. He starts following the instructions, uninterestingly first and
unknowingly later. Mr. Han doesn’t teach him Kun Fu. Instead, he teaches him a
much needed lesson of life, discipline. And
in the process, the boy learns some patience too.
So, when Dre returns home from the first day of training and
puts his jacket neatly on the hook, it surprises his mom and what surprises
more is him saying ‘I don’t know’. Here, Dre is lucky to have such a teacher
though he couldn’t delve the meaning then. But not everyone among us share his
luck. Still, each and everyone knows the story of Ekalvya from Mahabharat. Yet
we prefer to ignore.
Life gives us lessons. Some become the signposts while other
go unnoticed. They don’t leave any visible mark, yet they have their meager
existence. In the philosophical words ‘life is a training session that ends
with us.’ This might be the reason why people take it for granted. Nobody likes
a nagging teacher around. We tend to ignore the lessons even though we know we
are being taught. Ekalavya’s story ends with him losing his thumb. We all
remember that.
Therefore, people might be saying that life screws us all.
It takes its toll. Folks, life is not a social media enthuasiast that will
troll you. We get screw only when we ignore a lesson taught by life. In other
words we get punished for not learning from the lesson we call a mistake.
Nobody is sent perfect in this world. The person achieves
so, will become god. And this world still belongs to humans, barring a few self
proclaimed gods or messengers of gods. We are allowed to do mistakes. In fact
we are bound to err and that’s what makes us humans. But we should keep on
learning from them.
Some, take learning for losing courage. They cage their
hopes inside a shell and never let their aspirations fly again after one
failure. Well, that’s a wrong perception of learning from mistakes. One needs
to outperform self and shine again. We are allowed to fail again, but with a
new mistake. Repeating a mistake is a
crime or it’s like you punishing yourself over and again. Losing heart is not a
solution to your mistake, but winning a mistake is.
We all are like little Dre from the movie ‘Karate Kid’ and
our Mr. Han is invisible who is at the job of training us. There are people who
still have hopes from us like Dre’s mother from the movie. There’s never the
end to hope till it actually ends. Better we start putting our coats perfectly
on the hangers. This might begin to set our lives on the right paths.
Mistakes are occasional. Learning is eternal.
