Remember when we were small children and often at night, to help you fall asleep, our mothers’ would tell us beautiful stories of fairies and kings and kingdoms and fantasy characters, all with a good ending containing mostly a lesson to learn for us small children. Many of us would have nodded off to sleep before the stories could be completed as it wasn’t the story itself which was comforting, the very experience of lying near your mother and hearing her soothing voice make up all those characters which would overall create the cocoon in which you would rest in and fall asleep.
Mother’s always tell their children of good, virtuous characters who did good things and saved the world from the evil and all these fairy tales have magical endings in which the good always triumphs over evil. The ultimate objective is that the child imbibe what he hears and understands that good and the protection of good against evil is very important and that in the end the good always prevails. This simple message would be at the end of every story which a mother would like to give her child.
So having grown up on such daily doses of good versus evil stories, why is it that when we grow older, all those lessons are forgotten by us and many a times we even loose the line dividing good from the evil. For many, this already thin line of separation becomes almost invisible and people tend to step over to the other side quite easily. And in fact many keep oscillating from this side to that side.
So then what wrong did our mother’s do that we were not able to imbibe all that they wanted us to learn from those beautiful bedtime stories? The fault doesn’t lie in anything that our mothers’ said or didn’t, the fault lies within us – once we grow up, we put those stories in the back burner of beautiful moments spent with your loving mother – the stories, the lessons conveyed through those stories, the significance of them, all are relayed to the same locker of memories which are to be cherished but not to be used for a specific purpose such as obtaining a lesson from them of any kind.
So then I ask you all, if at all, at the end of your lifetime, a fairy tale is to be written for you, to describe your life’s journey, how would you like it to be written and how would you like your own fairy tale to end? Would you like to be depicted as a character who was not virtuous enough or who did not do good things and believed in evil? I am sure none of us would ever want for such memories of ourselves to be left behind as our legacy. I am sure all of us want to be remembered as good people who tried to live a good life and do good for others as well.
So if that is the way we want to be remembered, isn’t it but proper to put our words into actions and start practicing a life like the one we want to be remembered by? Only if we do what we think and show this through our actions, will we be able to generate our own fairy tale in which good prevails over evil and we will be the lead characters leading the army of good against the army of evil.
We must remember this truth and live our lives accordingly.
Dr. Rajesh Mankani
