Hearing this from a person who has no relation to the stories of the Hindu culture might be a tad surprise for you. I am not sure whether you folks, by which I mean my fellow MBA aspirants, take out time for watching the much talked about show, Mahabharata, launched by a popular TV channel recently.
Well, I did and here’s what I want to say. I came across this character Karna- the eldest of the Kunti’s sons-the Pandavas and I found a lot of similarities between him and us. The first glimpse you have is of an infant Karna, who is dumped by his mother, in crude words. Helpless and alone, he fights his battle and grows on himself, without the patronage of his family. What I see here is an underdog attitude over shadowed by a great fighter attitude. Many of us are, as I would like to proudly put it, fighters. Not deterred by the hardships of life, we fight. We come across situations where the options are starkly two- Flight or Fight and when we do not give up and rise again after a fall, we are not mere underdogs but fighters.
Karna had a desire to learn. Though belonging to the royal clan, he hardly knew about it. Brought up by a charioteer’s son, he was denied the privilege to educate himself under the aegis of the great teacher-Dronacharya by the teacher himself. Irrespective of our backgrounds, we slog through the process and make it up to the interview rooms and then the great school rejects us. Karna did not give up his desire to learn archery and took up his lessons with another great sage Parshuram. The never-give up attitude for the skill you covet is worth appreciating.
Karna never forgave humiliation and persevered to reach his ambitions. Also, known as the most generous and a paragon of friendship, he gives us hope that however difficult the path is, if you have an devoted desire and an unwavering determination, you will achieve what you aim for, no matter what the situations are, no matter who your opponents are, no matter what the odds are.
So, shirk off your disappointments, self-pitying and all the negatives you have built up these years. Cliched though, Believe in yourself and work towards your goal. The more difficult the path is, the more content you get at the end of the path.
So pick up your tools. Lets gear up for the fight.