Chapter Two : Moral of the Story

“And the deer was thus saved from the hunter’s net. A friend in need is a friend indeed!”

Isn’t it wonderful to take a stroll down the lanes of childhood memories! These children’s stories sure fly you into the swirling mass of fragments. I try to set up a camp and drift off into its dungeons - a scavenger hunt for lost innocence.

“Bhaiyya, I did not understand the Moral of the story”

Is there a moral? I read the ending once again – quiet unsettling within. The trick is to stay on the line, your line – neither to the left nor to the right for these minds are highly impressionable. I do what I always do, help them find the answer and hope to get some myself. Ever wondered how an answer is not really an answer, but a series of questions?

“Forget the moral, what did you understand from the story?”

“The deer first helped the rat and when the deer was caught in a net by the hunter, rat came and helped the deer. If you help your friends, your friends will help you”

“Excellent. So there is your moral J”

Inadequate! Thoughts trickle down and bleed profusely now.  What if? Could it be the uncovering of the secret door to the foundations of a sick society?

“Why did the rat help the deer?”

Surplus of answers follow but a pattern seems to emerge, most of them on the premise of deer’s good deed earlier or a prior connection between the two animals.

“What if the deer and rat were strangers? What if the deer hadn’t helped the rat before? Would the rat still have helped the deer?”

I let the class ruminate on this for a while.

“Yes”

Umpteen reasons spanning “humanity” to “right” to “good” are thrown at me from different corners. I gather them aware of the quiet condescension that forms in my head.

 “What do you think right or good is?”

The enthusiastic buzz around the classroom has reduced to a murmur, reminiscent of a boring math class or a disturbing movie. Here lies the major fallacy of our educational paradigm, our goods, our rights and those synonymous are all predefined. Woven into its very fabric, it allows little freedom for a child to define his own good, his own right.

But that’s preposterous! How could a simple story of friends helping each other lead to a sick society?

Not caring is not our problem, its thinking that we do that leads to chaos. While the message is clear to an adult (or is it?), a plethora of questions and simper conclusions engulf a child’s mind. There are many ways in which the story could be told, yet only one way where it would not transform into a divisive subconscious. The separation of individuals into friends and strangers, even enemies perhaps, starts with this simple narration of whom to help and why to help? What if the story was told in a different way?

“The rat helped the deer because he saw that the deer was caught in a net and it was in pain and it couldn’t witness that pain”

“The rat helped because the deer was caught in a net and had lost its freedom and the rat wanted to give it back”

“The rat helped because the deer was about to be killed and the rat understood the value of life”

“The rat helped because…”

We could go on, with narrations that neither rest in the past deeds nor a future debt. They rest in the present. They rest in the Now. Decisions that arise from the depths of intuition do not suffer from moral dilemmas. It is this lack of clarity of thought that our children suffer from, as they grow into adults under the burden of worthless thoughts that plague them. Can the old stories be viewed from this lens? Thoughts bleed profusely once more as I stroll through those memory lanes probing for gems to polish!