Skip to main content

Chasing Hares

I have always thought that the story of the hare and the tortoise was a very misunderstood tale. Think about it. A hare and a tortoise decides to race. The faster hare bounds off, sees that the tortoise is far behind and decides to knock off for a while. The tortoise catches up, overtakes and crosses the finish line. And next thing you know, generations of humans laud the tortoise's achievement and writes it into their folklores and storybooks for their children. Furthermore, parents and teachers ceaselessly drill impressionable young minds with the message that,

Slow and steady wins the race.

Though, if you think about it at a much deeper level, the tortoise did not win because it was slow and steady. It won because the hare was fast but stupid. All the way in front and still far from the finish line, he decides to take a break. The only person whom I knew to have done something like that was my cousin when she was a 8 year old and took part in a race in her school. Halfway through, all the way in front, she stopped and started picking the grass on the field, though this time, as an act of defiance against her stunned parents who had not bought her chocolate earlier. But she was a kid and kids do stupid things. In fact, kids are meant to do stupid things. If Usain Bolt picked grass halfway during his race, that would be something.

But this thing, complacency, affects us humans more than it should. My life is littered with such unnecessary moment. Just a few days ago, I took my mid terms for one my modules. My (ever present) friends convinced me that since I was going to S/U that module (ie I just need to pass the module without caring about the grade), I did not need to study for the paper, as any 'idiot' could pass a paper in NUS. Over time, I have found that any exam I took in NUS evoked for 4 different kinds of emotion in me. I would happy, if it was an easy paper. I would be satisfied, if it was a decent paper. I would be concerned, if it was a difficult paper. And finally, I would be laughing, if I knew I was f****** for sure. This time around, I couldn't stop laughing.

I partly attribute this and many of my other similar failures to the story of the hare and the tortoise. Whoever wrote it, had he or she got the moral of the story right, it might have taught me a valuable childhood lesson and saved me from such moments. We need to set the record straight. The story of the hare and the tortoise needs a new moral that future generations can understand and appreciate so that they do no end up picking grass halfway during a race. A new moral that goes something like,

Complacency can be a real bitch.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Sparing the Rod

 She gave me a look of deep displeasure, not very atypical of the look most members of the opposite gender gave me. “You know you can’t do that in Germany?”, she asserted with the same authority my mother used to tell me about not messing around in her kitchen.  “Yes I am aware”, I meekly responded, knowing well that any kind of argument about this would not end well, so it was better to close off the topic quietly and unlike the kitchen, I could not afford to get kicked out of Germany. She was not the first to respond with such hostility to what seemed like the most natural of things in my experience. The last one who told me the same was a teacher I had met at a party. When she sounded shocked that I was ok with it and said it was not right, I (with some alcoholic courage) had retorted, “How would you discipline them then if they do something wrong?” “I would tell them I am very disappointed with them”. I almost laughed. However, that was very much the theory of my new frien...
Post a Comment
Read more

An Eye for an Eye

"Something that three or four years ago you told me was one of the touchstones of maturity: being nice to people even when they’re not nice to you…" - William Styron It was an plan that came out of nowhere. Perhaps half depressed by the winter and half depressed by the inactivity at work, there was sufficient turmoil in the mind to create these type of plans and then let it fester, until something that started off with a what-if turned into a why-not. It would have been the perfect revenge for the past hurt and humiliation that was yet to completely heal.  The circumstances were similar. On one side, an eager visitor who had traveled far to say "Hello" and on the other side, a host, bewildered and surprised by this visit. In the first case, the host would not receive the visitor, who would turn back humiliated and vowing never again. Now the roles were reversed and I was the host. What if I agreed to receive? What if in reality I did not plan to receive? ...
Post a Comment
Read more

Passage to Vietnam : Part 2 - The Food

Imagine your friend passes you a fully boiled egg, garnished in onion and sauce. You use your chopsticks, lift it up to your mouth and bite of half the egg. It does not tear away as easily as you thought it would. And it tastes queer. Then while chewing away at that half, you look down at the other half on your plate and you see tiny grey feathers and a tiny leg bone staring back at you. My exact feeling at that moment was like I was making love to a woman and she suddenly reveals in the middle that she used to be a man. In short, I wanted to puke. I am not a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine. During my 18 days stay there, my Viet friends were kind enough to bring me around and let me taste about every kind of street food and drink, from snails to sticky rice to Viet baguettes to local alcohol. Other than certain items here and there, I generally thought the food lacked any kind of strong flavour to it. Plus, for some reason, I could not understand why the Viets went to the extent of ea...
Post a Comment
Read more