The Centre fruit Ambassadors

Many a time, when I am out for a shopping spree, I end up receiving centre fruit - the most ubiquitous Indian-made chewing gum in our indigenous marketplace- in exchange for my balance money. When I am on a roller coaster ride of ‘retail therapy, I don’t even mind brooming all those colourful tasty rubber from the counter table and instead, entomb those incidents into the wallet of forgotten stories.

Because there’s nothing that we can do at our own disposal, it is by far, easier and cheaper to fall prey to this formulaic business ethos of accepting the colonization by gum money. Our native retailers and entrepreneurs have largely consumed this as a commercial right ever since our coins or (the less usage of currency with lower denominations) vanished into thin air from circulation in the economy.

In the nations abroad, the primary lifeline of the economy and of course the delivery of various public services are sustained by the obtainability of huge volumes of coins. Transactions are rapid, businesses are swept, and service deliveries are elegant, since the value of money, either to be paid or received, can be easily translated by using the coins. 

But in our marketing picture, in the absence of having no coins or denominations that can substitute our exchange, we either risk surrendering the commodities, thereby triggering the anger dynamite of the shopkeepers, or wait for them or run ourselves to nearby shops and persons to rescue us in finding convertible payable amount. 

If the use of the coins in our business fair is still prevalent, the purpose of minting our coins will be served besides aiding to reserve its flow and make it visible for all the generations. It is nevertheless, acceptable for this generation to know that the Bhutanese coins existed, but it would be painful that the forthcoming generations would not even hear of its fateful existence, let alone see it. 

Picture courtesy: Click LINK

Till the homecoming of our coins into the theatre of economy, the salespersons can dance on their feet as ardent Centre fruit ambassadors, either by design or by accident. While it is certain that the gum money given to compensate our balance money cannot be used to purchase the goods even from that same shop where we obtained it, as a customer, the least we can do is to forcefully never forget the revolutionary story of centre fruit progress, in terms of its colour, size and taste.

“God is not against money, He is against the money being used outside His purposes”- Sunday Adelaia

The Philosophic Calmness

A student of grade 9 hit me with a blackboard duster right on my face while he was playing with his friend, just as I was about to enter the class to teach Physics after the morning recess. Though I succumbed to the pain of that semi-wooden duster, seeing the inflamed face of the child filled with fear and guilt, I chose to craft some irrelevant flesh of conversation with the class—only to settle the dust of fear that had begun to cloud the mind of that student. What could have escalated into a severe reprimand faded instead into silence. That woeful incident quietly passed into the folds of forgotten history.

Bizarrely, the wick of my temper—which is normally highly inflammable and explosive—froze in that moment. What extinguished it was the sudden recollection of the phrase, “The Philosophic Calmness”, as described by Freeman Dyson in Disturbing the Universe. The concept lingered, and it became the guiding principle of my response.

Within that small canopy of forbearance, I attempted to view the accident with calmness. In that moment of self-restraint, I mentally hyperlinked the incident to the things I had done as a student some 12 years ago. That reflection led to a quiet realisation: what he had done was not malicious, but a mere manifestation of adolescent mischief. From a psychological perspective, he was playing a healthy role as a juvenile—portraying the rudimentary and expected characteristics of his age. That is, he was modestly living his youth.

Yet, the pain on my face — further fuelled by embarrassment at the breach of classroom decorum—demanded a response. Hence, I resolved to bathe him with the soap of positive disciplining, not as a punitive act but as a gentle deterrent, so as to curb the possibility of future relapse.

giphy.com

Understanding Adolescence through Reflection

I narrate this episode not to highlight a ritualistic pattern of student behaviour in today’s classrooms, but because it clothes itself with a flesh of profound insight. The message, if digested with the right prescription, could serve as a valuable alternative for us—as parents and educators—in understanding adolescents with more depth and less judgement.

In contrast to this relatively benign incident, students do, at times, find themselves embroiled in matters that are legally grave, disciplinarily sensitive, and societally intolerable. When this happens, schools call upon parents to take responsibility for their child’s actions. Unfortunately, some parents shift blame onto the institution, criticising the consequences imposed without realising that these measures are designed to correct the wrongdoer and deter others from repeating the same.

Worse still, in certain instances, parents aggravate their child’s distress with additional humiliation and unnecessary apprehension. They fail to see, with a certain degree of calmness, that these acts—however inconvenient or embarrassing—are part of growing up. It is sometimes acceptable to be caught puffing off, to take a forbidden sip, or to be seen with someone special. After all, how dull and fun-less would life be without the thrill of living it your own way—the guilt of breaking a rule, the suspense of being caught, and the reckoning with the consequences that follow?

We have all travelled through that same corridor of adolescence, troubling our own parents along the way. Therefore, we must learn to view today’s youth with that same philosophic calmness—the understanding that, so long as no criminal mindset is cultivated, a certain degree of impishness is tolerable.

Of course, this is not an invitation to celebrate or encourage disruptive behaviour. Even when viewed narrowly, it must not be misunderstood as permission to let disorder grow unchecked. Rather, it is a call to respect the age they are passing through. As responsible adults, we must meet them not with disdain or denial, but with understanding and patience. Using our own calmness as a philosophical lens, we must realise—they are teens, and they are simply living their age.

Why Enabling Conditions?

For over some months, numerous inevitable factors have cocooned and fenced my energy and enthusiasm to work on my dreams to a dead full stop. And consequently, each day, it became a ritual for me to amputate the limbs of my dream that was woven many moons ago. Regrettably, by now, most of my resolutions are at standstill. 

This process of amputating my dreams all started after I got the new placement on my return from my studies.  A great deal of stuff has to be removed from my resolution basket owing to an inescapable tempest of disappointment triggered due to this dreadful posting. A series of my professional plans and activities have suffered a huge massacre, let aside the burial of my personal imaginings. In the simplest equation, it became a bedrock cause to engulf all the ‘enabling conditions’ for me to execute my plans, both professional and personal. 

Image courtesy: Click LINK

Today, I have learnt that just having a sketch for myriads of a plan to do something is never sufficient. Domestic comfort is absolutely necessary if one wishes to deliver the best of our professional services to the optimum level. Otherwise, when one is deprived of such luxuries, even in the timid heart of a poor man, the seed of hostility and imperviousness grows. So, it is vital for one to have those enabling conditions to make the pictures of our dreams transpire to a full life. Enabling conditions are indeed equivalent to the salt in the curry of fulfilling one’s dream. 

However, when those enabling conditions have to pass through the teeth of people on the power and greed, even the strongest fibres of the blueprint to do something either suffer from a fatal bite or croak undigested. And such abortion of plans due to those external threats is so painful and disgusting. 

I have survived those fatal bites for the last 8 years in the service. I am, even at this present moment, sustaining it. I have echoed my dreams of growing tall to those powerful ‘responsible ears’, to which few heard but ignored, while some turned a cold shoulder. But each phase of those dramas is all scripted into the library of my memory, which one day, will feature in a form of fiction.

As of now, I am enduring with wounded dreams, praying to the Almighty to grant me an enabling condition, at least to enable me, craft those factual stories of mine to a fiction- after all, all fictions are based on facts.     

“Success is a science; if you have conditions, you get the result”- Oscar Wilde.