Courage

When i was very very very verrrrrry small, I had to have a lot courage to eat food especially when the bogey man was lurking around and .. u wudnt believe it.. but my mom was afraid of him too. In those days, I had to have the courage to swallow up anything pushed into my mouth to save my mom.. and eventually me.

When I was not very very very verrrrrry small, but small enough, anyone who could kill a lizard was a superhero ( and to some extent I still feel the same way). Just image, he must have had a whole lot of courage to first look at the creepy dumb thing in its eye n then go whack on it with a broom without fearing where it would head next or whether its detached tail wriggled around your toes. Yuck .. disgusting creatures lizards are. Most of the time my saviour happened to be my dad. Now i have to beg my brother or my younger sis to do that. i still dont have the courage to look at those wriggly creepy things ..

Then in school, my primary school years, my mom had to have the courage to wake up early, then worse .. try to wake "ME" up, get me ready for school, pick me up from school (my dad dropped me to school .. with an equal amount of trouble). Now let me tell you , in those years we had to depend on the local busses, by local buses I am talking about drivers who would almost run over you when they pulled over to stop to pick you up at a bus stop, with people crowded in as if this was the last bus from earth to heaven, the worst part is the swearing in the buses.. gosh.. nightmare it was. And my parents had to do this almost everyday.. you really really had to have the courage to think about going thru this the next day too.. and to actually go thru it as if it was nothing great.. is another thing.

Few years after that, courage meant.. being able to go around solving mysteries like the famous five. Only if i had just four other friends like those in the famous five and they had cycles, and if i didnt have to go to sleep early, if i lived near some mountains or rivers, and if there were spooky mysteries around that waited for us to go n figure them out, if my friends had uncles who had maps to some undiscovered treasure, gosh .. forget it .. i dont think i can be like them .. this "if" list can go on n on n on.. and to add to it i should have had the courage to .. awww.. again i started this .. forget it.

Later, anyone who could get thru a "panga" with our princi, had to have a truckload of courage, and i didnt even have a glass full of it. I remember, in school, somewhere in the final years, as usual, some of us in the last bench started talking (in whispers).. the teacher found out ( dont ask how .. ;-)) .. but she found out ). So the next thing that happened was .. she asked the "back benchers " to name the person who was talking. All the courage we seemed to have (to talk in "her" class) evaporated. Then she made all of us stand up and sent all of us out of class.. accompanied with an instruction to vote the person who would be sacrificed to the princi IN FIVE MINUTES. Now the truth was that all of us were talking at some point of time in that class, but at that fateful moment, we didnt know whose mouth was moving so we couldnt let one person take all the princi stuff. So .. all of us decided to turn ourselves over to the princi.. about 15 of us in all. Then what .. the usual stuff.. almost one hour (which seemed like half a half a day) was spent kneeling in the playground in the HOOOOT sun with small stones which felt like sharp nails under our knees. And if u were lucky enough to get caught often, parents would be lovingly invited for a nice little chat with the princi. I didnt even want to try out things like that but i had some really courageous friends who did go thru this though. They had real guts.

The later years courage dealt with flavours of the above type of courage. Bunking boring classes of grumpy lecturers in college for movies, manipulating practical experiment records, even going on treks for that matter, taking part in plays which might either end up in getting urself smashed with tomatoes/ eggs (ok ok .. im exaggerating) or gets sarcastic looks from lecturers (but this is true), and trying to remember the whole semester's portions overnite to vomit it out on the answer sheets in exams the next day and try to argue that some of the questions were out of syllabus when we didnt know what the damn syllabus was made up of. Anyway, alllll these smaaaaaaall things required a loooooooooooooooooot of courage.

Nowadays it has got to do with trying to meet up unrealistic deadlines. Deadlines.. I wonder who framed that word. Only a sadist could come up with a word like that. One almost dies whenever there is a deadline.
Yeah. I know there is a challenege involved and all .. but the truth remains.

However all this courage seems like nothing when u compare it to the courage of other people.

Tangible courage can be seen in the people living in spite of all the tyrants who go around gifting fear, hunger, homelessness, poverty, making orphans out of children .. eventually making hell over here on earth. Hats of to all the people who have the courage to live, to move on inspite of all they have endured. I pray that their hope and courage can help them to overcome the problems that still await them and i pray that the world will become a heaven on earth and I hope that there is no more sorrow, no more terrorism, no more cries .. not very realistic .. but.. no harm in hoping and praying.

Over the years, when I see the what courage has means to me, I see that it has evolved from something what only superheroes could have, to something what all of us have. It has has varied from something that needed a lot physical energy to do to things.. to something that helps one endure the pain, sorrow, hardships and challenges of daily life. To me .. courage is an impetus to survival. Without courage we would all be lying shrivelled up in a corner when a problem came up. I think we get this courage from our Creator. It may be varying in degrees at different times and in different people, but eventually I feel that courage is what makes one live.