Are you shocked to read this? I was sitting in front of my school principal few days back and I mentioned the same thing. He was looking at my face with an expression full of questions. Because I said this is what we need to teach to today’s generation. He was astonished. He did not say anything but I could read this on his face because we are always told we need to win. There are thousands of books available in the market which tell us how to win, how to be successful, how to achieve etc. However, I did not find even one book on what I was looking for. For same research I went to the book fair too, to no avail, I did not find there either. I started explaining this to my principal too and then he agreed.
Since the time we are born, we are told we need to become this, we need to become that, we need to win in life, however, we are not told, that to win we fail too. If we fail we are reprimanded and if we win we are rewarded. Fair enough, a victory needs to be rewarded but who will encourage the failed one to fight again? Very few parents do that. Result is that most of the students are conditioned to put efforts to win and if they are unable to do so, they cannot handle it. I have seen students committing suicide when they did not get good result or running away from home as they did not want to share their result with their parents. This is about students, I have seen even adults also doing so like when they fail in business, unable to get their girl friend or worse they kill someone because they could not get him/her. This is not the way it has to be done. Still it sounds like hypothetical. Few days back I went to my cousin’s daughter’s birthday party. In the end they had a box hanging on the ceiling full of some candies, pencils, colours and other small gifts like this. The birthday girl poked it and kids were stomping on each other to collect the maximum number of gifts from the box. However, 8 year old boy could not get his hands on even one gift. He started crying which embarrassed his parents. So they asked the host to give some gifts to the kid so that he could stop crying. However, he refused. He demanded that the box had to be put up and poked again and this time only he would collect all the gifts. To save their face from further embarrassment, his parents left the party with him immediately. This is the example I saw recently, that they cannot lose even the small trivial things as their ego becomes bigger than the motive. Motive was to have fun but it turned ugly with the ego. Similarly, when we are told we only have to win, our ego does not let us accept the defeat.
