I know how to differentiate between excellence and perfection
Excellence, i can reach for
Perfection is gods business

Saturday, November 6, 2010

A SMILE : WORTH A THOUSAND CRACKERS & A MILLION DIYA’S

It was deepavali yesterday. My first one in Bangalore. After seven long years of moving out of Delhi, I lighted diya’s and celebrated it in grand style. A cracker free, pollution free deepavali. A senior of mine (Nidhin) from college joined me at my place. Both of us decorated our house with diya’s and lighted them. To be honest, it was real fun! There was a light breeze blowing which would extinguish the diya’s as soon as we light them. We had to run around to keep everything lighted up and mind you, it was not an easy task. It took us around an hour to get everything lighted up. But the end result was so beautiful that it made us feel that all the effort was really worth it. Here is how I celebrated my Deepavali.

http://picasaweb.google.com/107212723743566082106/Diwali2010?authkey=Gv1sRgCLekyvfA4oiaVg#  

The above picasa album will show that I had a beautiful deepavali, which included decorating my house, cooking food and distributing sweets. All this celebration was crowned with a small event which took place a couple of days back. Me and some of my friends (Hafeez, Rashid, Nidhin and Myself) went to Brigade Road in Bangalore last weekend. Every time I pass this place, I used to see a small girl aged around 20 holding a lot of red roses in her hands and running amongst people requesting them to buy one. I have seen this so often, that it had started to be a regular sight on Brigade Road.  These rose flowers are priced at INR 10 per flower, and believe me; those roses are so beautiful, that they are worth the price.

This time when we crossed this little girl we felt like doing something for her. May be buy a couple of roses and thereby help her. But as we didn’t have anyone to give those roses to (I am not lying :P, we are all single) we were a bit hesitant. Then we had a small but sweet idea.
We went to her and enquired the price. She said she is selling it in bunches of three with each bunch worth rupees thirty. She asked us to get two such bunches as we were four and the fact that she had so many more flowers to sell. We agreed and bought the flowers from her. We gave her a 100 rupee note and she gave us the exact change back. She thanked us and turned to leave. We called her back. Utterly perplexed on why we are calling her back (may be thinking that she had not handed us back the correct change) she came back to us. All of us smiled and gave her that bunch of six flowers saying that we bought the flowers for her. This took her by surprise. She didn’t know how to react for a couple of minutes. Then, reluctantly, she took them back from us, smiled, said “Thank you bhaiyya” and left.

There are times when people fake a smile and there are times when it comes from their heart. I have always felt that the smiles that come from a person’s heart are special and can be easily distinguished from a fake one, as a smile from heart will reflect in that person’s eyes.

I read in a news paper some days back that Bangalore will light up this deepavali as around 23 crore rupees are spent on fire crackers. For me, that one smile from that small girl was more precious than all those crackers burned together. It just took 60 rupees this deepavali to make it one of the best deepavali’s I have ever had. I will remember this one for a long time to come, more because of the smile on that kids face than the other celebrations that we had.

I learned a basic fact this deepavali which goes like this:
It’s beautiful to see someone smile, and more so, when you know that you are the reason behind that smile

6 comments:

  1. hmm...in this busy life, stop for a moment ..look around us..LIVE for sometime, LOVE for sometime..and then continue ur run !

    touching !

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  2. Well said vishnu.. I completely agree with you.. we are so busy running to reach our destination so much that we forget to enjoy our journey.. There are so many small moments in your life, where had we paused for a moment.. would have given us so much happiness that the journey.. no matter how tedious and difficult.. will become a memorable one..

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  3. That was really touching..

    There is no point in celebrations if people around you are not happy.

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  4. Thankyou Panu a.k.a wolverine!! :)

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