TINKERING OUR NATURAL SELF

In the late 90s, while working with my first employer, I had a one-hour journey one way everyday to office. Although I had a beautiful Yezdi CLII bike that time, I preferred driving him only through the silent canopies of the Railway roads near my home and never to work through the inching and suffocating city traffic. I preferred different modes of public transport instead.

In the last few years running up to 2003 however (after which I left the company), I had a senior officer who gave me a ride in his car up to a point that was pretty close to my home. On a few days I got picked up on the onward journey too. He was a novice at car driving and needed someone to sit beside him to help him with the left side, as his judgement of that side was not still good enough, according to him. And so, I, who had not yet driven a car, came in to play that role. I had to just warn him when he was inadvertently getting abnormally close to anyone or anything, leave alone having a collision. Things went fine and I proved to be a very helpful person to him especially while driving through crowded roads, where judgement came in for a big challenge. 

Right from the time when my tryst with his car started till the day I left the company, one thing that remained unchanged in his driving was that he would almost always have a part of his right hand out of the window. This was to give some signals to the vehicles behind him when required.

We discussed many topics while on the move. It could be company politics, films, songs, Tamil literature or plain humour. I thoroughly enjoyed these times, but when he got tense speaking about the company politics or too excited cracking a joke and took off one hand from the steering wheel, I would get butterflies in my stomach:). Nevertheless, I was lucky to get a big load of wisdom every day from the senior officer.  He always had this impression that I was a very silent person who never came out of my shell. I never tried to change that impression he had and in one way I am still a person who loves more of silence. And this means I love shells:) But being stuck inside a shell was a wrong take from his side, as I was and am still, very good at expressing about what I believe in. But again, winding back to my childhood, my father had told me how I was a timid child and that I would break into tears on seeing guests visiting my home. That wasn't a normal thing then. So, it was but natural that people like the senior officer had this impression about me. May be he had spotted something inside me but I found it difficult to agree with the "stuck" concept :)

One day morning, as I was accompanying him to office, a transport bus overtook us from the wrong side and was almost on the verge of colliding onto our vehicle. The officer stopped and so did the bus driver. An altercation had started while both were still in their driving seats. The officer stepped out and took a piece of paper from his pocket to note down the registration number of the bus with a plan of lodging a complaint. The bus driver who was in an agitated state, tried to pull the  paper piece from his hand, but he could not. And while all this was happening, I was sitting like a rock inside the car without moving an inch. I did not, as I really did not know how I could do anything there to help him. The whole happening came and went in about five minutes. Thinking about it now, I feel I should have at least stepped out.

When the altercation was done and the vehicles started moving again, the officer turned to me and asked me why I had remained silent all the while. He in fact went further and mentioned about it to a few others at the company too. This was the person in me, decades back. With the passage of time, I don’t know what had happened to me. Today, people at my workplace, in my friend circles and even at my home, would be happy if I am silent. They find me overreacting to situations and I have earned the tag of being too sensitive. Of course, as a good by product of this character, many times I would be the person taking up an issue that would be hindering progress and addressing it, while many would prefer to leave it alone to take its own course so that important people in power or prominent people in the family or social circle are not antagonized. I have often been advised these days that inaction is a skill that I should develop and that I will benefit a lot if I kept quiet.

Many times, I sit and wonder how this transformation would have happened. I believe it could be because of the deep impact of the feedback given by different people like this officer, on my silence earlier in my life. And that has led to my desperately trying to become somebody else. And what I have become is not a fine social being but a being that reacts very harshly. Now, am working on regaining that lost poise into my approach. Although there was enough silence in me during those earlier times, it was studded with lot of poise too in it.

I think one should be very careful while trying to change one's natural self. We have to spot a right path to bring in improvements so that the original good strengths are not lost. I believe that most people who give us feedback or criticize us, don't tell us how to implement the points. If we are not confident humans the implementation does not give a good result. We end up doing something in desperation. We have to understand the feedback properly and implement it very judiciously as each person is a unique creation occupying a unique space.

You can find my short story book 'A PEARL FROM EVERY OYSTER' at:

https://notionpress.com/read/a-pearl-from-every-oyster

https://www.amazon.in/Pearl-Every-Oyster-Stories-Shorter/dp/1948473151/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3GI23X9JIKQGK&keywords=a+pearl+from+every+oyster&qid=1583428674&sprefix=A+Pearl+from%2Caps%2C302&sr=8-1

https://www.amazon.com/Pearl-Every-Oyster-Stories-Shorter-ebook/dp/B07948GRVC/ref=sr_1_1?crid=1H9GU3Q8JNH29&keywords=a+pearl+from+every+oyster&qid=1583428722&sprefix=a+pearl+from+ev%2Caps%2C363&sr=8-1

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