You are the Change

Today, when my car was waiting at the traffic signal, a boy came up to me. He was in his teens and was holding a piece of cloth. He went and, without saying any word, he started cleaning the front mirror screen of the car with it. After he had cleaned it, I gave him a 5-rupee coin. He took it and went away to another car. During the whole episode, a beggar came to the car next to me and he asked the driver for money. The driver gave him a 5-rupee coin too. These two beings were equal in the amount of effort they were both putting in to earn a livelihood. But the main difference was attitude. One preferred to live life with self-esteem and pride, whereas the other traded his life for it. However, the one who has traded might go home with a little more money than the former one, but that doesn’t mean this person is successful. Success is a relative term. It depends on what you had earlier and through what you have to go through in order to achieve what you have now. Success is not a destination, it’s a journey. I have seen many people personally who are pessimistic. The people who have taken their lives for granted and never had courage to shape the course of their lives. They have just believed themselves to be the victim of life and have forgotten that they chose it to be that way. For me, life so far has been quite amazing. I have been through many ups and downs. Success and failure have both been part of life, but I have always tried never to choose myself to fall a victim of it. The passion to strive to excel has always been the driving force. I am the part of society which is quite compressed and pessimistic. In newspapers and television discussions, I found people find it hopeless in the current situation; for them, to run away from this society if the best option. The whole blame is given to politicians and the military. For a country with the lowest literacy rate in South-Asia, lack of basic necessities for a major chunk of the population and an increasing inflation rate, it is quite evident how much anger will be in the minds and hearts of its nationals. Day by day, earning a decent living is becoming difficult. People who have resources try to settle in a well-developed alien land. Many of my relatives and friends have opted for it, since they found this country incapable of providing them with food, shelter and security. I won't say that I am a true patriot, because I too feel that way, I too want to get some western country passport and want to settle there for rest of my life but then something stops me. Instead of running away, why don’t I be a part of it and try to change it to a better way? I know I can’t change the world in a day. I can’t change my country in a day. But I guess I can make a change in one life today. I still remember, during my college days, in one seminar a renowned social activist said, “Changes in the lives of people are brought by one man’s effort”. Only a single person always makes a difference. There are many examples. If those people had chosen to run away, then the world would not have been the same today. If there were no Abraham Lincoln, no Muhammad Ali Jinnah, no Mustafa Kamal, no Mahatma Gandhi, no Nelson Mandela, no Mother Teresa, no Mao Tse Tung, then the world of which we are part of would be brutal and would be a world of barbarians. A little courage, a handful of hope, a sense of humanity and a quotient of self-esteem are needed to be awakened within us. If it happens, then we never have to run away and never have to take life as a burden to us anymore.

"You must be the change you wish to see in the world." (Mahatma Gandhi)