There is
definitely an advantage of being in the naughtier section in the school. One
typically gets more time with the principle and learns management much before
friends.
By the time I
was in high school, I could easily guess how my principle would react in my
next meeting. After all the meetings I had with him, I eventually learned the
biggest lesson of my life: “Accept mistakes as soon as you realize it”. Owning
your mistakes is the safest way out of any critical situation.
In my career, I
don’t say I have followed it religiously, but I have definitely seen a huge
number of people reacting differently to their own mistakes, making the
situation much more complex.
If you can
recollect any such situation that you have gone through, try asking the
question to yourself “What would have happened if I accepted that it was my
mistake as I did not do it intentionally?”. What do you hear from within?
Probably “I could have saved a relationship”, or may be “Life would have been
so simple”.
Now assuming we
know (now) what we should do next time in such a situation, it is critical to
understand the reason we behave the way we do.
After a lot of
reading, research and looking back at my past, I realized there is a big flaw
in the education and/or the parenting system in Indian society. I consider
myself to be the lucky one, as my parents knew I could do much better if I
streamlined my energy on education alone. But they never stopped me from trying
things my way. They were always there when I failed but they never even a single
time took away my opportunity to stand up without support.
As generations
evolved, humans try to ensure that they protect their children from the
hardship they have gone through. Every generation has tried to do its bit but
we never realized when the protection became tyranny.
In one of my
conversation with an old friend, I realized that in his plan to secure his
child’s future, he had already decided that the unborn child is going to be an engineer
from IIT. Yes, you read it right, “The Unborn child”. It was another four
months the child would see the world.
In the quest of
supporting our kids and to make them perfect so that they can be an engineer or
doctor, are we taking away their childhood?
It is good to
have annual assessment or a quarterly assessment for the kids in school. But as
parents, are we happy with the school assessment? Of course not! We judge our
kids every day on their hand writing skills, painting skills, mathematics skills.
We are worried that the child next door will get an admission to the best
engineering college and not our child as their mathematics seems to be weak
even though he/she is just in first grade.
Will we ever
realize that we are destroying the risk taking ability of our children? If we
look at the statistics of risk taking ability based on the study done by
various organizations, we would notice that the risk taking ability differs
from country to country and from culture to culture.
This means,
that the way we bring up our children has a great impact on their risk taking
ability or in the way they are going to be tomorrow as grown up adults.
Also, we were
taught to take life seriously from the time we did not even know how to spell
the word “seriously”. In the fight for “an engineering seat” from a reputed
college, we were taught that there is no scope of mistake in life. We were
never allowed to fail and we were never told what to do when we fail. I guess,
this is the reason many children make their way to the newspaper headlines for
wrong reason as they were not mentally equipped to fail.
As we grow, we
let our fear grow. For example, the fear of failure, or how the world would
react for the unforgivable mistake of dropping coffee on the carpet. What we
end up doing is we kill the ability to accept the mistake due to the fear of
unknown. When in a situation, we stop our logical mind from working and get our
defenses strong. We were never programmed to handle failure.
If we allow our
children to live and not exist, fail and get up, we can eliminate the cause of
various conflicts, heart breaks, etc.
Life can be
simple, if we allow it to be.
Thank you for
reading. Please feel free to leave your comments and suggestions.
Thank you
Manisankar Das
