I am motivated to write this post because of my friend UA’s response to my last post ‘No Kidding’. He came out with a very relevant point: we perceive failure as a sin, something criminal.His comment refers to an adv of a leading toothpaste where a mother hides her child’s face and avoids camera when a reporter asks her whether her child has failed. She then passes the blame onto her toothpaste and looks confident and happy. UA says he is appalled by this commercial and I back him because if we look deeply, this adv is giving wrong messages to the audience.
Firstly, why is the lady hiding faces from the camera if her child has failed? That means failure is a sin and it’s the worst thing that can happen to a child. And if a child has failed, does that means his parents are in no position to show their faces to the world?? Imagine how much pressure it would put on the child himself, who would see and subconsciously register the fact that because of him his parents are facing the humiliation.
Secondly, the mother says with a somber expression “pata nai kaise fail ho gaya” (don’t know how he has failed). Are we teaching our kids to win at all costs, to become bookworms, theoretical robots or to gain applicable and real knowledge? Are we preparing them for a rat-race of academics or we want them to apply that somewhere usefully? Do we want them to become ‘educated’ or simply exam-passing literates?
And the third thing, which I hated the most too- Suddenly, the mother places the blame on the toothpaste she is using and then the duo regains confidence and feel easy. Are we teaching our kids to pass the blame? Instead, we must teach them to deal with the problem and own the failure as much as we would own success rather than passing the buck around . We must teach them to look for solutions to every problem, not to pass the problem itself to someone else and come out clean. Thus, in the real life a kid who flunked the exams would say "not me my tutor has failed or my books have failed but not me"
I would love to share a small incident that taught me valuable lessons in life at an early age. When I was in seventh standard I flunked the mathematics exam in the first term. I was called to the staffroom and very calmly my mathematics teacher asked me the reason for my low performance, since I had been a good student. I told her that my mother was admitted to the hospital and my father lacked time and I always saw him tensed and busy. Other members were busy too, so I had managed whatever I could, all by myself. She told me to again go through the lessons and consult her for any doubts. I managed time and made a timetable especially for maths, I asked my friends and teacher and meanwhile my personal life came back to normal. In the final exams I came second in my class and got good marks in that very subject- mathematics. Also, this entire thing deepened the bond between me and my friends and I understood how to handle similar situations in future.
We can only value light if we know how scary the dark is, similarly only failure prepares us to understand the joy of success. Failure is not a sin rather an experience that always teaches us something.
