Tortoise and the Hare
You
already must have heard the story, but still, let me tell you the story in
short.
Once there lived in a forest a hare and a tortoise. The hare was very proud of his speed. He made fun of the tortoise for his slow speed. The tortoise challenged the hare to have a race with him. The hare accepted the challenge.
The race started.
The crow was the referee. The hare ran very fast. The tortoise was left much
behind. The hare stopped to take rest under a tree. He fell asleep. The
tortoise passed him and reached the winning post. The hare woke up and ran as
fast as he could. He saw that the tortoise was already there at the winning
post. He had won the race.
Moral: Slow and steady wins the
race.
Whoa!! Bravo!! Great Moral, but wrong message. I agree to the
point that being slow and steady doesn't makes a person loser. But it doesn’t makes him/her a winner either. Not at least in this universe in which we are living, out of all
the existing parallel universes. In one of them, it might be a truth.
I would like to tweak the moral a bit. Slow and steady wins the race*. Now I will write in the bottom, * terms & conditions apply. Now I
can write at least a thousand word essay elaborating these terms &
conditions. But I will not, because nobody cares, they are just terms &
conditions, but nobody reads them.
I will now move towards doing an autopsy of this story. “Hare made fun of the tortoise
for his slow speed. The tortoise challenged the hare to have a race with him.” What the
hell? What in all the universe, tortoise think of himself? What you will call a
bicycle rider challenging a Ferrari rider for a race? Okay, let us assume,
tortoise was in anger and wanted to prove himself. Let me even agree that he
had confidence of beating hare in race.
Let us move to the later part of the story,
“The hare stopped to
take rest under a tree. He fell asleep. The tortoise passed him and reached the
winning post. The hare woke up and ran as fast as he could. He saw that the
tortoise was already there at the winning post. He had won the race.”
I see a difference
here, it is not the case here that tortoise won the race. What exactly appear
here to me is, Hare lost it. Don’t ask me what is the difference between both.
There is a lot of difference, sincerely speaking, there is a lot of difference
between yourself winning a race and everybody else losing it.
It happened once, it may happen twice or thrice or ‘N’ number of
times. In real world, Hares don’t sleep during races. They beat every crap out
of tortoises, almost daily. Many of these tortoises even commit suicides out of
their shame of being loser in this race. I am still not saying, the slow ones
are losers but they may not be a winner either. We must stop ourselves feeding
people with the false hope that even while being slow, they can win with the
people faster than them. They can win over them, only when, either they become
fast enough to beat them or faster ones start making mistakes. Being slow and
steady, you can eventually grow, you may eventually become faster than what you
are right now but you will never be able to beat faster ones, until you become
faster than them. But by being slow and steady, tortoise never became a hare,
and hare never slept again in any future races. Hare won again and again until
tortoise gave up racing with him.
But what happened with tortoise? He might have concluded that he
can never win the race unless hare do something silly. So, he might have
decided to play his luck with other hares in forest. Or he might have become
the fastest tortoise in his herd, because of constant racing. Then, he might
have started a ‘Tortoise Olympics’ and had won it every time until somebody
else faster than him arose.
Races
we face daily in our lives aren’t much different. Some of us are tortoise and
some of us are hares. Hares keep competing among themselves and so the
tortoises. Sometimes, a tortoise rises from his herd to challenge hares, he
loses it and goes back wherever he belongs. He still remains a hero of his
herd. But some of us are hares are disguised as tortoise. We realise our true
identity only when we are challenged enough to find our limits. You might have
identified yourself as a tortoise while reading this, but believe me, try your
luck, push your limits and try to find who are you. Are you a hare or a
tortoise? Don’t conclude it soon enough, coming out of cocoon had never been
easy for a butterfly, learning to fly had never been easy for a bird, so
identifying yourself will not going to be like drinking a cup of coffee. You
will fall, you will give up your hope many times. But before giving up just
remember why you started. All the best.
