Tough Times But Tougher People

Finally post MBA found some time out despite not being busy in the usual chores but the unusual ones.The extended gap between the completion of  degree and the beginning of corporate life is not at all motivating especially when you are amongst the first few people to get a campus placement but the last one to actually to get a joining. Huh !! and yes it feels great to be back from the self imposed hibernation and write about something I have wanted to from a long time.

A conversation with a friend who has been living in Japan from the last few years and was a witness to the disastrous and Killer Tsunami on the phight of people, their mental state, the earth quake alerts sent every half an hour and how my friend and his friends/neighbours had to sleep in open garden areas almost every night  leaving all their belongings back home and carrying only a small bag with dry fruits and water bottle, all this left me with a feeling of uneasiness & worry and could not help but stay in constant touch with my friend. With every hour the situation was getting worse, the fear of nuclear gases, the constant alerts, the increase in the death toll was adding to the psychological state of  the people and what happened after a few days was undoubtedly the most surprising or should I say the most inspiring- my friend and his colleagues had joined office back and were working full time. When asked about this the reply I got was "People here are very strong,they are used to situations like this and they know how to handle such situations ", this conversation took me back to several instances which I had heard of ,read,seen or been a part of  since my childhood and the only conclusion I could draw from it was that If times are tough then people get tougher, no matter how difficult a situation is, how helpless/demotivated/incapacitated one feels an otherwise ordinary man(woman) gets that supreme strength both physical and mental (emotional) to overcome the situation and fights back in a heroic fashion to put an end to all the misery and pain. Whatever the situation is ,a natural calamity, a fatal disease, ruthless human or rather inhuman activities causing loss and pain people stand up for it, fight back and win over it and it is this attitude of human beings which makes them the most powerful of all species and has enabled them conquer the highest peaks in the world and the leave their mark beyond this world into the outer space also.

Though there are hundreds and thousands of instances around the world which support my belief in this , the one close to my life is a tragic event that struck my family in the year 1995 when in a road accident I lost my eldest brother and my parents lost their first child. May be i was too young then to understand the loss but when i sit and think of it today I know what my parents have gone through espceially my Mom who not only lost her son but her father and sister also in the same year. I may not able to describe in words the grief she must have gone through , the loss was so deep for her that she acquired the fatal disease Cancer, she was bedridden for 2 years and while everyone had lost hopes there was one Man who stood strong , a man who could not even mourn the death of his Son , My  Dad who had to fight all odds and channelize all his energy, faith, wisdom & courage into saving mom and bringing her back from the claws of the deadly disease. Even today I faintly remember the way Dad would motivate mom, medicate her, take care of  me and my siblings, worrying about the business and finally deciding to close it down  and with every thought my love and respect for Dad grows indefinitely. When everything went wrong Dad stood strong and with his immense perseverance ,dedication, faith and love was succuessful in bringing mom back to good health. After his struggle for more than 2 years when mom was finally cured he also had to bring his business back and start it all over again which was not an easy task and he did successfully and at a scale bigger than it was earlier.

Through all this if there is anything I or we (If I may say so) learn or undertsand  it is that no matter what happens, no matter how difficult a given situation is there is always hope, its about not letting setbacks destroy you, not getting bogged down by failures but about having faith in your ownself and being determined in overcoming difficulties. We all  have to face tough times at some or the other point in time and its not really easy to come over it , at best what we can do is take inspiration from people around us and have faith in our own abilities. Remember when the going gets Tough , the Tough gets Going !!