TALENTS, TOO, COME TO US WITH A CLAUSE ATTACHED

Pic.: Dilip V.

If you think, there is a dearth of talent around us, you are wrong. There is talent galore… Loads and loads of it. There is dearth of discipline… Self-discipline.

When I was in eleventh standard, we had a wonderful teacher who taught us the Language, Kannada.  His name was Shri. Padakanayya. One day, while discussing a poem, he made a very profound statement. He said, “God gives each one of us a great strength (read it as Gift or Talent); but, He holds back ‘something’ from us so that we remain humble, grateful and deserving.”

I was barely a teenager, then. Still, I could grasp the depth of our teacher’s words. What God holds back, becomes our weakness… Our lack of self-discipline. He expects us to work on it before we can encash our talents.

Talents and gifts are God-given, no doubt. God is all loving and merciful, no doubt. But, He isn’t a fool to ruin us by placing precious pearls in our hands. If man knows what happens if pearls are placed before monkeys, doesn’t God know it?

There is no free lunch in this life. Talents, too, come to us with a clause attached to them: ‘Subject to your self-discipline’.

I have written on the issue of talents and self-discipline many times before. “Talents alone won’t do,” I have screamed from top of the roof… I am adding this, too, today: “They can’t”

Talent alone couldn’t have not done it to Amitabh Bachchan. Talent alone couldn’t have done it to Sachin Tendulkar. Talent alone couldn’t have not done it to Lata Mageshkar. I am naming them here, because, these stars have endured in the skies for a long, long time…  Certainly, not by their talents alone.

Not by their talents alone. I say it, once more.

GERALD D’CUNHA