Turning Points in the Lives of the Great

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Turning Points in the Lives of the Great

 

 

"The reasonable man adapts himself to the world; the unreasonable man

persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all

progress depends on the unreasonable man."

 

-- George Bernard Shaw

 

Incidents occur in the lives of every one of us. Such incidents come

and go without affecting us in the least. However, many 'trifle'

incidents have been the turning points in the lives of those destined

to be great. It was the night of Shivaratree. Devotees had gathered

in the temple to keep vigil and participate in the prayers. Late

during the night, certain devotees had fallen asleep while others had

started dozing. One young devotee who, like the others, had been

fasting remained wide-awake, his attention fixed on the statue of

Shiva. Something happened that would disturb the mind of that 14-year-

old boy. A rat arrived, boldly ran here and there over the idol and

gnawed at the offerings.

The boy, whose name was Moolshankar, could not digest what he beheld.

How could an omnipotent God accept such desecration? Doubts entered

his mind; he started questioning the power that was supposed to

embody the idol. He left the temple, went back home, broke his fast

and reflected over the incident. Moolshankar was shaken up by this

incident and by a couple of deaths in the family that occurred later.

 

After some years, he would leave home in search of the true Shiva. He

met the blind monk, Swami Virjananda, a famous Vedic scholar, who

accepted him as his student. When it was time to leave, Moolshankar

who had changed his name into Swami Dayanand promised his guru to

disseminate the message of the Vedas across the world. His

outspokenness and his revolutionary ideas would naturally create for

Swami Dayanand many enemies. But fearless and dauntless, he would

continue his work relentlessly.

Swami Dayanand would become one of the greatest social reformers

India had known. Apart from preaching the Vedic Dharma and his

crusade against blind orthodoxy, he fought against the caste system,

against untouchability and for the emancipation of women. He laid

much stress on Education and went to the extent of proposing free

compulsory education for children, both boys and girls, through State

legislations. He would establish the Arya Samaj in 1875 in Bombay.

Shivaratree is celebrated by our brothers and sisters of the Arya

Samaj as Rishi Bodh, the day of awakening or enlightenment.

 

One great Greek mathematician, physicist and inventor was having his

bath in a bathtub. The water in the tub overflowed. Something normal

to us but not to Archimedes who, forgetting everything about his

bath, ran out of the bathroom in the costume of Adam shouting

joyfully "Eureka, Eureka" along the streets of Syracuse. The

overflowing water had helped him discover what would later be known

as the Archimedes' Principle.

 

 

Voltaire relates the story of a young man sitting in a garden like

many others. The young Isaac was staring in the air when he witnessed

quite an ordinary happening. A ripe apple from a nearby tree fell

down. The young man wondered why the fruit did not go up into the

air. What a silly question! His questioning would however, lead the

English mathematician, Isaac Newton to come up with the Law of

Gravity.

 

 

A shy and unsuccessful lawyer who had just been called to the bar was

offered one year's work in a foreign country. He seized the

opportunity and travelled to that country. He suffered a couple of

humiliations one after another sometime after his arrival there

because of the colour of his skin.

The young lawyer, Mohandas Karamchand Gandhi was travelling by train

with a first class ticket. When he reached Maritzburg -- capital of

Natal in South Africa -- station, he was ordered to move out of the

first class compartment and go to another compartment because

coloured persons could not travel in the same compartment as whites.

On refusal, he was thrown out of the train by force and left to spend

the night in the station's waiting room without any overcoat to face

the bitter cold weather.

Sometime after this incident, inspite of a bona fide ticket, he would

not be accommodated inside a stagecoach because he was a "coolie". He

was given a seat on one side of the coach. The journey had not ended

when he was exhorted to relinquish that seat on behalf of another

passenger. When he refused, the man in charge boxed his ears.

After these incidents what option was left to the young lawyer? This

is what Gandhi writes in his autobiography, `My Experiments with

Truth'. "I began to think of my duty. Should I fight for my rights or

go back to India, or should I go on to Pretoria without minding the

insults?" Gandhi concluded that it would be sheer cowardice to run

back to his country without fulfilling his obligation. He decided he

should "try to root out the disease and suffer in the process."

Redressing injustices would become his mission and would turn a shy

and timid lawyer into a world figure who would be revered as a saint,

a Mahatma in his native country.

 

 

The young Agnes, groomed by her mother to care for the destitute,

decided to join the Order of the Sisters of our Lady of Loreto in

Dublin. In 1928, the young sister who had been trained as a teacher

was sent to teach History and Geography in a school in Calcutta. One

day, while she was strolling along the streets of the city she came

into contact with poverty in its worst form. She saw old and sick

people left to die in the streets like animals.

These destitute could not react even when rats were gnawing the

little flesh that still clung to their skeletons. Her decision was

taken. She would stay among those abandoned creatures, she would try

to find a shelter for them, she would share their pains and sorrows,

she would give them the love they had never received and above all

she would made them feel that there were people who cared for them.

Mother Teresa was born. She would be considered a saint before her

death, before any beatification ceremony by the Vatican.

 

 

Siddhartha Gautama was a prince. He lived in his father's palace and

was protected from all contacts with the outside world. However, when

he secretly left the palace in the company of a servant, he came

across an old man, a sick person, a funeral procession and a

religious man. These experiences, quite ordinary things to us, would

influence Siddhartha to such an extent that he would made up his mind

to leave the palace, his wife and his new-born son in search for a

cure for suffering. Gautama Buddha founded Buddhism and taught his

followers how to escape from the cycle of rebirths, hence suffering

and attain Nirvana through his Eightfold Paths. Buddhism is today

practised in most of East and South East Asia including China and

Japan.

To become great, one should think big and become a little

unreasonable like the Wright brothers who, on seeing a toy glider for

the first time, dreamt of building an airplane and flying it. A most

foolish idea that was dismissed by their father, Bishop Wright with a

curt remark: "Only angels can fly."

 

 

Leckram Gunnasaya