Don't ever change

sangeetamall — Tue, 24 Mar 2009 16:00:00 +0000

There are two banyan trees behind my ancestral house in Dehradun. They’ve been there forever, and my mother tells me that they were there even before she was born. They both have the features of banyan trees, the large leaves, the ugly roots, the groaning trunk. But the roots of one have never reached within four feet of the ground, while the other goes deeper into the soil all the time. They have the same rainfall, sunshine, oxygen levels, but the short tree could never grow taller. Or happier. It wears a mean, sad look, and has looked like that all my life.
It’s the same for people. Mean people stay mean, happy guys remain happy, bad-tempered fellows can never learn to control their temper, and even when they look like they have changed, the smallest crisis triggers off people’s true nature. When we leave school, we tell our classmates, “Don’t ever change.” Well, no fear there. They aren’t going to. Actually, their traits only become more pronounced with age. Nobody ever sobers down, or straightens out. They just put layers of other stuff on top of their character.
For instance, I could recognise Vidya, my schoolmate, whom I hadn’t met in over a quarter of a century, almost immediately. As soon as she opened her mouth and said, “Oh, it’s you.” The emphasis on ‘you’ denoted a mixture of surprise that I still existed, and disappointment at the fact. That was always how she met me.
This is bad news for parents who think they have got their wild streak under control, and their children will never know what they were like as kids. Their children know. They don’t know that their children know, actually.
So watch out, Rats. Your children know who you are.

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Don't ever change