God creates everyone to become ‘somebody’. Each scar can be turned into a star. Human beings are unique. Each has a talent which is unique. Like billions of snow flakes, we have children with diverse capacities and abilities. Anita was bom in a poor family. Her parents did not want her to continue her studies. She went on a fast for three days and made her parents agree to her high school education. She attended some training sessions on bee keeping. She found swarms of bees approaching litchi trees. She gave private tuition to village children and started her bee keeping business. Within a few years, there was a huge demand for honey from Anitha. She not only made money for her family, she taught girls of her village to learn to do bee keeping. Initially it was not an easy job. She was stung many times. She went to school with swollen faces and was mocked at for doing a man’s job. But she did succeed. Later on she became the Panchayat president and did many good things.
Now Anitha’s life story is in NCERT textbooks. Similarly Sakshi Malik won the first medal in a wrestling match for medal-hungry India. It was Sindhu who brought laurels to India by winning the world title in badminton. Even Mary Kom who got five times gold medal for boxing was not bom with a silver spoon in her mouth. Recently, Prime Minister Narendra Modi has opened “Mary Kom Regional Boxing Foundation” in Imphal, Manipur. She did not even have enough money to attend her first international boxing contest in USA; Lai Bahadur Shastri, who was our former Prime Minister, had no money to travel by boat to his school. It cost one rupee those days. He used to keep all his school uniform and the books in a bag, keep it above his head and swim with one hand across Ganga everyday to school. He was very short in appearance. When a foreign delegate asked him if he was not embarrassed as he was puny in size.
He laughed and said, “Why should I? Every other leader has to bow and talk to me. It is honouring me in fact.” People irrespective of their economic backgrounds do succeed. Stephen Hawkins after being declared that he suffered from a debilitating paralytic attack asked his doctors if his brain was okay. That feeling made him the most powerful scientist in the world. He was called the living Einstein. He wrote the book, “the Brief history of time”. Contrary to the predictions of doctors, he lived upto 73 and died. He is a role model to all differently-abled persons in the world. When everything is lost hope remains. I agree that every body is special and a hero. This applies to rickshaw pullers and the Prime Minister of the country, to the Pakora salesman and IT giants. All are humans and each one has a special skill. Let us respect everyone.
