Bollywood superstar Amitabh Bachchan had once tried to get a job in All India Radio. He was rejected because they found his voice very unsuitable. Little did those honourable judges know that the voice they were rejecting would one day become one of the most famous across the world. We can only thank God that people like Mr. Bachchan did not give up. History is replete with such stories of success.
To be overpowered by the fear of failure is a natural phenomenon and it happens to everybody. It often happens that man’s desperate and repeated attempts to make a mark are frustrated by a cruel, prejudiced and capricious divinity. Some give up, believing life to be an empty dream. Some don’t give up and many of them become successful.
Emperor Ashoka had to face extreme hostility and enmity from his brothers before he finally succeeded in his attempt to ascend to his throne. His ancestor Chandragupta Maurya, the founder of Mauryan dynasty, had no mean task in hand either. Born of humble and ordinary parents, he had to overcome terrible challenges while being trained by the shrewd Chanakya to be finally able to overcome the might of the Nanda Empire.
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When Humayun was driven out by Sher Shah and his son Akbar was born at Amarkot, how much hopeful would he have been of recovering the glorious throne he had inherited from his father Babur? Well, he did not give up and that is what mattered. He recovered his kingdom and his son succeeded him to become the emperor of Hindustan at the tender age of thirteen.
As long as we live, challenges and failures are bound to come before us. To fall while confronting a challenge is not shameful. What is shameful is not being able to recover from the fall when God has given us the power to do it.
If we look at our struggle for independence, from 1857 to 1947, thousands of people attempted to become a part of the process of driving the British out of their motherland. Most of them perished in the process. Would you call them failures? The point is that even if you face irreparable damage in pursuing the right cause, you are not a failure, at least from the moral or spiritual point of view.
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We know the number of challenges that Gandhi had to overcome to become a Mahatma to the world. From being kicked out of his compartment in South Africa to being showered by lathis by the British, he underwent unimaginable hostility. But he stood like a man among men to assert his rights as a human being. Dr Mani Bhowmik survived colonial oppression, cyclone, epidemic, and famine to earn a PhD in Physics from India’s IIT and a Sloan Foundation Fellowship for post doctoral work at UCLA.
Later he achieved international recognition and success as a co inventor of the laser technology that made LASIK eye surgery possible. This is just another example to show how a man who could have been doomed to failure because of the circumstances of birth overcame numerous reverses to attain success. Never be afraid of the dark sky of failure. Just keep an eye on the stars.