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Monday, August 22, 2011

From rags to riches...a real story.


I was three years old when my parents built their dream home in Trivandrum. It was not in the heart of the city, but very close. My neighborhood looked more or less like a slum and our house was the only double storeyed structure which stood tall in the entire locality.

Every day, be it day or night, you could hear a tapping sound from any room of our house. Soon we got so familiarized to this noise that we couldn’t hear it anymore. Behind our house, was a small thatched hut, where a man who carved little elephants out of wood for his livelihood, lived with his family. His wife, three sons of whom the youngest was retarded, lived in this hut of two rooms. However all other houses here were more or less of the same type, and so we never felt anything so special about this hut or the people living in it. You could hear the tapping of tools on wood even at nights and many a time I have wondered the practicality of this to raise and educate two kids.

When I was in high school a major change came across this hut, as it changed from thatched roof to a tiled one. Tiled roofs are not very helpful on rainy days but are certainly an improvement from a thatched house. Then Papa used to tell me how hard work and modesty paid off. Me being a teenager at that time, despised advice and stories with morals - or lets put it this way, I hated anything which had atleast a remote chance of making me a better person. And not to mention at that age, parents would always sound wrong and outdated.

Years passed. Our neighborhood changed for the better. This month I came down to my home on a month long vacation. As usual I went to the terrace, and was in for a huge shock. In the place of the tiled roof house there is now a palatial double storeyed building, with modern amenities, granite floors and was huge enough to place our house inside it. Obviously, the man who made wooden elephants moved out and sold his land. I heard that his youngest son was moved temporarily to an asylum and this was a painful occasion for them and everyone else in the neighborhood. This could have made them move out. I stared blankly at the new house, which was getting ready for a house warming ceremony, decorated in blue and yellow lights.

Soon a lady emerged from the front door, appearing all busy and tensed with a huge vessel of a local sweet in it. She called out to someone and a guy took the vessel from her and went out. She looked familiar.Papa came on to the terrace for a smoke and told, that she was the same old lady, whose husband was the man who made wooden elephants. They’d saved and accumulated the meager income, and educated their sons, by living in poverty and sacrifice. The sons made good value of the money, got placed, promoted, worked in Dubai and London for almost a decade and gifted their parents with a home they deserved for sacrificing all their lives for them.

Do you know a better real story for the same theme?

9 comments:

  1. It's real nice to know that such stories do happen outside the pages of our moral science books too :)

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  2. I second the top comment. Our parents go to such extent to make us successful nd happy. Its good to see tht his kids dint forget tht.

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  3. I was a little let down when you wrote that the property might have been sold. But the revelation was encouraging and made me smile.
    Thank you, for sharing this.


    Cheers,
    Blasphemous Aesthete

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  4. Blunt: Hmm, yeah. It all gradually unwrapped before our eyes. A story with a moral.

    Red Handed: Rarely do we find kids like these. Especially in this thankless and forgetful era.

    Blasphemous Aesthete: I am so glad you liked it.

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  5. really nice to hear..as u said, it feels good to hear these kind of stories in real life.

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  6. Wonderful Anita...little things like these keep happening around us...it's just that we tend to be so pre-occupied that we seldom observe!

    such an amazing lesson though...someone I know is teaching her maids daughters as well as her own..the maid's daughters are doing better in class than her privileged one...so much to learn if only we are willing n less distracted!

    and yes, loved it when you said how we dislike something with the remotest of chance of making us better:-)

    a great read:-)hope the baby is doing fine and so is the naye naye mommy:-)

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  7. Pythoroshan: Yes. This happened before our eyes and I couldn't close my eyes to it.


    Praphul: Thanks, Praphul.

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  8. Suruchi: Hmm Yes...and I loved that teaching maid's daughter story. Its very rare these days...ie being human u know. Thanks for the beautiful comment :) Baby is fine by God's grace and so am I. Hope u r fine too . Take care.

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