Sunday ka philosophy quota….by the time you read this I would have finished running (people are so cruel, they call it walking when they see me!) the Standard Chartered Mumbai (half) Marthon,  2011…hopefully in good time…

There is always an opportunity to help others – and you have no clue from where it can come. Here is a story I once heard / read somewhere. I think it was in one of the ‘spiritual’ magazines. So is it a cut n paste?

Well of course it is. In fact all my stories are a cut n paste – in fact all are read, processed and then pasted. I hope you find it useful..need not find it original. Complain if you find it useless, not if you have read it earlier somewhere. The only original writers who existed in the world (there are people who dispute that too!) are Valmiki (of the Ramanaya fame) and Vyasa (of the Mahabaratha fame) – who dictated the story to Lord Ganesha!

So here is the story…

There is a nine-year-old kid sitting at his desk and all of a sudden, there is a puddle between his feet and the front of his pants are wet.

He thinks his heart is going to stop because he cannot possibly imagine how this has happened. He knows that when the boys find out, they will make fun of him.

The boy believes his heart is going to stop; he puts his head down and prays, “Dear God, this is an emergency! I need help now! Five minutes from now I’m dead.”

He looks up from his prayer and here comes the teacher with a look in her eyes that says he has been discovered.

As the teacher is walking toward him, a classmate named Ravi is carrying a jug that is filled with water. Ravi trips in front of the teacher and mysteriously dumps the bowl of water in the boy’s lap.

The boy pretends to be angry, but all the while is saying to himself, “Thank you, Lord! Thank you, Lord!”

All of a sudden, instead of being the object of ridicule, the boy is the object of sympathy. The teacher rushes him downstairs and gives him gym shorts to put on while his pants dry out.

All the other children are on their hands and knees cleaning up around his desk. The sympathy is wonderful. But as life would have it, the ridicule that should have been his has been transferred to someone else – Ravi.

Finally, at the end of the day, as they are waiting for the bus, the boy walks over to Ravi and whispers, “You did that on purpose, didn’t you?”

Ravi whispers back, “I wet my pants once too.”

Each and everyone one of us are going through tough times. May God help us see the opportunities that are always around us to do good.