The word failure is so much stigmatized that everyone is afraid of it. Nobody thinks out of the box. Everyone is running in one direction to get success. One is forced to use different methods to attain success. During this process one may intentionally or unintentionally harm others but the question arises, why?
Mainly, it's because of the culture we live in. The society with some certain norms, standards of good and bad. On the basis of these standards the person is being judged positively or negatively. The sense of competency, the race of success in which envious parents put their children in, the external pressure from society's judging "eyes". People may be judged in different categories and labelized as either losers or winners. There is a huge pressure of being successful and being competent which indirectly makes parents place conditional love on their children. Thus, a child is burdened with fear of failure and shame, where sometimes there is a competition with siblings, cousins and school mates.
However, in this article I would like to share a middle class girl's story. Story of resilience, story of fighting back, and learning that there is nothing wrong in failure. Like the other children having extreme burden of studies including pressure of getting best scores. She was also suffering from this wave of competition. And like other parents her's were also having high expectations from her, her mother demanded A+ grades as all of her cousins and sisters achieved so. She studied hard, she studied hell hard not to learn but to get A+ grade, she studied hard in FEAR of failure. At the end she ended up failing in her intermediate. She thought her life was finished, she blamed herself for what happened, she isolated herself so that no one would question her about failure. This failure destroyed her in bits and pieces. But when we look on the other side of society and our parents, we realize that there is some positivity in the world.
After facing the failure she found her mother supporting her and not letting her down. She found her siblings bucking her up and encouraging her to restart her efforts. So, with their support and encouragement she gathered all her shattered pieces, stood up and made herself ready for the second attempt. Yet she faced many taunts and "haws-haayes" from surroundings but it was her innate resilient personality, self esteem, self confidence and external forces like her family's support that made her strong enough to ignore all the bashing comments coming towards her and focus on her goals. Because she was not eligible to take admission in university her whole year got wasted. Nevertheless, she learned some important things in life that year. So, you can say it was her most important year through out her life. She had learned how to be strong, how to ignore, how to face challenges, how to do hard work and most importantly she learned not to fear failure. She understood the fact that failure is one important factor of life. After having the insight of what failure is and what fear she had. She never got afraid of it and when the fear got vanished she started getting success step by step. She turned out to be a fearless and strong person. Thus, she started achieving her goals one by one and now she is a position holder in master's degree programme.
Failure is not end of the world, failure is learning and most importantly it is the key to success. Failure makes you learn other way out when one way is closed. It makes you think productively. It makes you learn to re-try again and again untill you succeed. It makes you believe that it is learning not the failure untill you stop trying. It makes you believe that society also involves people who will encourage you, support you when you are feeling down, who will push you to try again and get succeeded. Failure is a step towards success.
"Uth baandh kamar kya darta hai
Phir dekh khuda kya karta hai"