SOME OF US ARE LATE-BLOOMERS IN LIFE

Pic.: Uaha Prasadh

While returning home, last night, I heard someone calling me from behind. . I looked back… It was one of my students’ mother. She just wanted to inform that her daughter had passed in the latest twelfth-standard Board exams. “Sir,* Prerna passed. Just wanted to tell you.”

So relieved this mother looked while breaking the news that her daughter had just passed with 51 percent!

The feeling of relief was palpable!

The daughter, a head-strong, confident girl, was not at all interested in studies… She was their adopted daughter – only daughter. The father had given up. The mother was wrecked with worry about this rebellious girl. I had told the mother, many times, one thing: “Ma’am, Prerna is a confident girl… she has a strong head… All that will happen – and, we should really allow that to happen – is that she will discover, eventually, what she has to do in life, and she will do it… She will get her fair share of success in life.”

Last night, I told the mother the same thing, all over again… “Ma’am., she will not do what you and I want her to do… She will make a few mistakes in life… She will frustrate you and her teachers, but, she will, eventually, land up where her heart has been calling her.”

Trust me, I was not trying to please my student’s mother.

I wasn’t good in studies at all at that girl’s age... I did not know what I was good at and what I wanted to do in life. My self-confidence, unlike this young-one, was at the pit and, today, most of my classmates and teachers, would not believe if I told them that I have been teaching for decades now, I have been writing, blogging, training and publishing books.

Some of us, in this world, are ‘Late-Bloomers’. We discover ourselves quite late in life. In my own case, the discovery happened when I was in FY B’Com when Prof. B.S. Raman came to teach our class. That’s the breakthrough: impressed with his teaching and personality, I dreamt, right sitting in that big class, of becoming a teacher, writer and person like him…

I never had to look back ever since then!

So, when I told the mother of my student, last night, that her daughter would do well in life, I was telling from my own experience…

Today, FB has got me in touch with many of my old friends and students. Many of them pleasantly surprise me…. I am so delighted and proud, too, that they have landed up at the right place, the place where their hearts have been calling them…

So, it, also, serves me as a reminder – a very important one – that, I should never ever discard anybody in this world as ‘useless’…

If I haven’t turned ‘useless’ in life, others, too, won’t. They have the right to dream and align themselves… just as I did.

Happy for your daughter, my student, ma’am…

*Name is changed

GERALD D’CUNHA