19th May 2011
Success is sweet: the sweeter if long delayed and attained through manifold struggles and defeats.
A. Branson Alcott
The result of any struggle is always a feeling of joy and ecstasy. Life will be a dull and boring game if there are no challenges to face. Just imagine if there is no opponent in a game of football! Will the players get excited if they score a goal? Or if the opponent team is a weak team, will the winning be exciting?
If things are offered to us in a platter, we will not enjoy the same. Just imagine a hypothetical scenario: Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi writes to the British Government to leave India and immediately the Queen of England agreed and declares India to be independent of the British rule! Do you think that Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi would have become Mahatma Gandhi?
If Mohamed Ali had not faced a Mike Tyson, do you think he would have enjoyed the game? Do you think Cocoa Cola would beam with joy with Pepsi does not fight for a bigger share of the market?
The irony is that want to be glorious, but we don't like the fight! But if we stop and think for a while, struggles are the testing ground to be our very best. Have you heard of the story of a man took pity on a butterfly trying to come out of its cocoon and cut opened the cocoon so that the butterfly came out without the final struggle? The man waited for the butterfly to take its first fight of freedom. But the butterfly had a withered body and shrivelled wings. It never was able to fly! The man did not know that the strugle the butterfly undergoes is the God's design to secrete coating from the body of the butterfly so that the wings will be stronger. Since the butterfly did not go through this process, the butterfly never had a strong wings to fly and was crawling for the rest of its life!
We need struggles and crisis to make us stronger and more efficient. A ship is tested on the high sea and not on the safe waters of a harbour!
Over this weekend perhaps you can do an exercise. List all the struggles you have undergone and think for a while if you would have enjoyed the success if there had been no crisis!
N C Sridharan
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