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.
