Free your mind

I was watching a documentary on Buddhist monks in Thailand where they were shown keeping tigers as their pets. These tigers grew up under the care of these monks and would obey all their orders like a pet dog. If any one of the tigers ever tried to show any kind of dissent it would immediately be forced to concede by showing a stick. The stick, to an outsider, would seem to be only capable of intimidating a smaller animal or perhaps an adolescent but how would it help a monk to wield his authority over a wild beast. The answer lies in the psyche of the tiger and not in the size of the stick. The tiger, when it was a small cub, was shown this stick which would make it submit to the will of his master and even though after growing up as a tiger the stick holds the same status of absolute power in its mind to which the realisation of its physical strength has no existence. I have heard the same thing about people keeping a big elephant chained to a rather weak one but it would be the same chain which was indeed a strong one when the same elephant was a small baby. I guess the same holds true for humans too not so blatant as in the case of these wild animals but something more subtle or should I say deeper. When I was a small kid I always wanted to ride a bicycle so my father bought one, the only trouble being that I was small and the bicycle was a tad bigger for my size and I obviously fell from it while learning to ride it and that was it. I could not dare to ride that bike again. I was quite bad at art and drawing and I remember I drew a diagram, that diagram was shown to the class as the one which should never be drawn the way it was drawn by me and due to this I hated biology because that subject involved drawing lot of diagrams. I wonder how many of these kinds of incidents would have happened to other people in the world and how this would have created an inhibition in their mind to try something which they were not very good at as starters. Recently I heard the news that Venkatraman Ramakrishnan was awarded the 2009 Nobel prize in Chemistry who is the seventh Indian to get this highest award in the field of science but what is more amazing is that he was a graduate in Physics and did his PhD in physics. He then designed his own course for transitioning from Physics to Biology! And surely this would not have sounded enough for him so he started researching in the field of chemistry and rest is history. Who would imagine in the wildest of their dreams to change the course of their career twice and that too doing it at a very later stage of their career. I am sure he would have his own version of childhood stories of several failures but the remarkable feature of this great genius lies in his strong will power and the tenacity to learn despite the failures. We as small cubs are always shown the stick but as we grow and become adults we have to erase those memories, forget that we failed and just remember to strive, strive not for success but for ourselves because not everyone can win a Nobel prize but at least can feel proud of themselves of not cowering at the sight of a challenge but standing up to it and giving everything we have to encounter the challenge head on because boundaries and limits are the lines etched in the minds and as long as we have no such boundaries, fear will fear us as its worst nightmare.