Gerald D'Cunha

“It is far easier to love an infallible god than fallible human beings.” ―  Marty Rubin O n my nephew, Macklin’s (my elder brother’s son) wedding day, I was the toastmaster. I did two goof-ups that day… Let me take you through the first goof-up... Macklin, after completing his B.E., had decided to be a sailor like his father. The difference was this: while his father had become a sailor after his ITI as a technician in the engine department, Macklin wanted to climb the ladder from the Fourth Engineer up to the Chief Engineer. I did not know about what people did on ships… The engine and the deck, both, appeared same to me till that mid-noon while I was raising the toast… I recalled my brother Franklin’s obsession with machines when he was a young boy… He was simply crazy about mechanical things. Dad’s old Favre-leuba watch and our antique alarm-watch… My brother alone knows how many times he had ripped them open...

S elf-importance and Self-respect are different - as different as chalk and cheese. Self-respect is healthy; self-importance is not. I think, all of us have this chalk-and-cheese stuff tucked inside us. If self-respect outweighs self-importance, it’s good for us, as well as for people around us. On the other hand, if our self-importance outweighs our self-respect, it’s bad for all of us. Often, we fail to recognize if a certain behavior of ours stems from our self-respect or self-importance. In that lies a lot of our misery, too… Let me not talk about others. I am nobody – in fact, too mortal a soul – to judge others. I am aware how frequently I throw my weight in my class room… when I use my temper and tantrum, when I am driven by impatience, when I act with intolerance. It, certainly, can’t be coming from my self-respect. It’s coming from my deep sense of insecurity, the area I haven’t still worked on fully; rather, I haven’t completely gotten o...