Hardest moments are not those when tears flow from your eyes, it’s when you have to hide the tears in your eyes with a smile to remove tears from someone else’s eyes.
Has it happened to you? If it hasn’t I am happy. But what I am not happy about is that some day it could happen to you. Like it happens to each of us some day.
Times when we have every reason to cry our lungs out and yet have a bigger reason not to cry. No matter what the tragedy, the one that is in charge has to roll his tears up into his pupils and put a smile of reassurance to those that he is in charge of. Those of you who couldn’t relate to 
the picture here this is the TV shot of the corpse of Maj. Sandeep Unnikrishnan who hailed from a Nair family settled in Bangalore that had migrated from Cheruvannur, Kozhikode district, Kerala. He was the only son of retired ISRO officer Mr. K. Unnikrishnan and Mrs. Dhanalakshmi. Sandeep sacrificed his young life to save our country from the savage attacks by mindless people. Details of those attacks are covered by thousands of blogs elsewhere.
I am reminded of a dialogue from an Indian film I watched long ago which ran like ” Badshah Roya Nahee Karte” which would translate as “King can not weep”. And in the same (or different) film it said “ Walid kay kandhe pur Aulad ka janza – duniya ka subse bhada bojh hai. The heaviest load a father can ever have to bear is to be a pallbearer of his offspring. Yet, the same father has to dry up his tears when faced with the son’s young bride or mother.
Tragic – but True!
Take a tangent.
I am not merely referring to death. Death is not the only tragedy we are faced up with. Look at the current global recession we are faced up with. I am told it’s the worse ever since World war II.
The number of jobs that have been lost the world over has crossed all possible fears. Reports say there are families in more than one country and including the developed countries who are on record to say that they would prefer death to this disaster.
According to reports around 3000 cars are left abandoned at Dubai airport – left by people who lost their jobs, could not pay back the banks and would be faced with imprisonment. They chose to flee leaving the cars behind some of them with defaulted credit cards inside and an apology note pasted to the windshield.
At the time of writing no one is sure – of whether we have hit the rock bottom yet. Rock bottom, incidentally and interestingly, is the only hope the world has today, since as the adage goes, from there you can only go up.
Why am I talking all this?
No, not to repeat what you can read in any newspaper.
But the fact that this is the time when people all over the world expect their leaders – political or otherwise – not to shed tears fro the tragedy that’s been forced on us but wipe the tears off the cheeks of hundreds of thousands of people that are suffering. In a certain sense that’s what most matured political leaders of the world are trying to do by consoling the world with bail outs packages. All of us know nothing can bail out the world from what has sunk in. But, one of the worst things that a leader can do at this time is to start crying with the people. The leader has to show grit and guts and tell his people we will build it all back.
These are just two examples. Look around your self, you will find many. You will find people who must shed tears and yet must not.
All of us at some time have to roll back our tears and smile.
6 Comments
I believe that one of the best line of defence in such times is to smile – for one smiles even in the times of adversity, it confuses our detractors.
I have long learnt to survive using this. The world has been fattened in previous times now struggle in the reality of the hardships that is upon us.
Only the fit will survive and come out unscathed. Good luck to all in trying times.
RB.Tears come easily to me.I hope there is never a time when I have to “roll them back”just to assure people who are dependent on me that “all will be well”.I believe that even when I let them flow freely, I will be able to give them the strength and belief that this too shall pass.Thank you for letting me comment.
Great! But will mere crying with such a magnitude of people solve any problem. I wonder what we can do as individuals to mitigate the problem ! And the political leaders would gave to do much more than crying and will have to make practical efforts to “Build it all back”
Thoughtful writing !
Natural order of things must be trusted in the hardest of times – even in this self inflicted recession brought upon innocents by reckless corporate greed.
The natural order will create leaders out of this adversity and provide renewed hope and promise to the ones in despair.
Thought provoking, RB.
My 2 cents worth is that, we must keep faith as it does move mountains.