The Boiling Frog

The Dusherra of 2018 wasn’t really a pleasant one for our residential complex, as various families were preparing for the celebration and getting into groove of the festival of lights suddenly a cry from one of the flats changed the entire mood of the celebration. A 40 yrs old married man having a kid of around 5 yrs had hanged himself to death in his bedroom. A suicide had happened in our building for the first time and for what? A guy on a previous day is buying grocery for the house and waving hand at few people around. In the morning he gets up does his regular chores, ties toran (archway) on the door, drinks water, enters his room and that’s about it.

After few days it came to light that he wasn’t getting regular salary at work and had some issues in his marriage. Due to these reasons giving up on life. Now that was quite disturbing.

I went into a thought spin on how could someone end his life because of few unpleasant things happening around, was there a better way of handling the situation.  

A Jiah Khan commits suicide due to a broken relationship.

Chetana Pandit, who people looked up to for her bike riding skills who was an official coach to Anushka Sharma, Kareena Kapoor, Katrina Kaif etc. for riding bikes committed suicide due to relationship issues and inability to achieve what she wanted from life.

Bhaiyuji Maharaj, a spiritual guru who was almost responsible for enlightening life of others wasn’t able to manage his home front and finally shot himself dead.

Robin Williams, the happy and pleasant man of Hollywood who brought a regular smile on his fan’s face committed suicide due to depression.

The National Crime Record Bureau report a figure of almost 40,000 students committing suicide in the last 5 years. Most of the reasons been Drug Addiction, relationship failures, depression etc.

The list just seems unending.

While people are really becoming very intelligent with so much of knowledge at disposal but in the endeavor of been knowledgeable and intelligent somewhere the element of having the right wisdom is getting missed big time. Everyone seems to be in a hurry of reaching somewhere or achieving something and somehow have lost the art of pausing and thinking about what we are actually doing.

We take up a new job, start a new relation, become a part of a new friend’s group, work toward some social cause, start a new addiction maybe smoking, drinking etc. Been the curious kinds we like to start new things every now and then. We not only start but even ensure others know it as well. Now with the social media becoming an integral part of our lives, whatever people start is known to all. We start a new job it gets updated on Linked-in, someone start a new relation or get married it gets updated on Facebook, a new friend’s group goes on Instagram. So now we not only start things but we also ensure people know about it. But the same thing that we started if we aren’t able to sustain, then things becomes awkward.

 We are naturally very hopeful kinds and we always hope things to get better and in an endeavour of waiting for things to get better we lose our power of endurance. This reminds me of a nice anecdote I had read sometime back. It was referred to as The Boiling Frog Syndrome.

THE BOILING FROG SYNDROME...!!

It said that put a frog in a vessel of water and start heating the water… As the temperature of the water rises, the frog is able to adjust its body temperature accordingly… The frog keeps on adjusting with increase in temperature…

Just when the   water is about to reach boiling point, the frog is not able to adjust anymore…
At that point the frog decides to jump out…
The frog tries to jump but is unable to do so, because it lost all its strength in adjusting with the water temperature…Very soon the frog dies. What killed the frog?
Many of us would say the boiling water…
But the truth is what killed the frog was its own inability to decide when it had to jump out…

We all need to adjust with people and situations, but we need to be sure when we need to adjust and when we need to confront / face..
There are times when we need to face the situation and take the appropriate action…

While we just need some amount of intelligence, hope and curiosity to start anything new but it takes a lot a wisdom to realize which thing needs to be stopped and which can still continue.

Take that well deserved pause, take a stock and allow your wisdom to do the job.

It’s better to have a timely exit than an undesirable end.