Today I am going to share with you how important to have the traditions which we live by. We must understand the myth and realty about them, at least to be wise with them.
I will share an article which I read couple of months back, and it is quite interesting and meaningful for all of us. It was narrated by the Late Hon Former Chief Minister of Goa, Manohar Parrikar.
It goes like this............
" I come from the village of Parra in Goa.
My village is famous for its watermelons. When he was a child, the farmers would organize a watermelon-eating competition at the end of the harvest season in May.
All the kids would be invited to eat as many watermelons as they wanted.
Years later, I went to IIT Mumbai to study Engineering.
I went back to my village after 6.5 years. I went to the market looking for watermelons. They were all gone. The ones that were there were so small..
I went to see the farmer who hosted the watermelon-eating contest.
His son had now taken over. He would host the contest but there was a difference, when the older farmer gave us watermelons to eat he would ask us to spit out the seeds into bowl.
We were told not to bite into the seeds. He was collecting the seeds for his next crop. We were unpaid child labors, actually.
He kept his best watermelons for the contest and he got the best seeds which would yield even bigger watermelons the next year.
His son, when he took over, realized that the larger watermelons would fetch more money in the market so he sold the larger ones and kept the smaller ones for the contest.
The next year, the watermelons were smaller, the year later even small. In watermelons the generation is one year.
In seven years, Parra's best watermelon were finished".
From this story, there are few important learnings we can extract..
1. In humans, generations change after 25 years. It will take us 200 years to figure out what we were doing wrong by depleting and destroying the earth through our current practices.
2. We must retain and sow back the beautiful gifts of nature we have today to sustain the livelihood of our generations to come.
3. No matter how much modern we become with current generation, we should never ignore our tradition, it certainly has some deep meaning.
Very deep insight into the story.
ReplyDeleteHow just the outlook can make a vast difference!