A teacher asks a
student in the class, ‘How many colours make the Indian flag?’ The girl
answers, ‘Five colours!’ The teacher is shocked. He repeats the question, ‘How
many colours in the tricolour?’ The girl repeats her answer, ‘Five!’
The angry teacher asks
the girl to stand up on the desk and repeats the question, but the answer
remains unchanged. As the other students laugh at her answer, the livid teacher
asks her to list out the colours.
The girl replies, ‘at
the top is saffron, white in the middle, at the bottom is green... the Ashok
Chakra in the centre is blue in colour…’ The humbled teacher asks, ‘And the
fifth colour?’ The girl says in a gentle voice, ‘Red… of the blood that drenched
the flag wrapped around the body of my father who died for the country…’
The teacher and the rest of the students learn an
important lesson… so did we who watched the short film with an important
message: Symbols in various images may not reflect the reality. Reality is
multi-hued… multi-dimensional… made of multiple stories.
So often, so many of us focus on a constricted, coloured
view. The limitations may arise from conditioned prejudice or superficial
posturing or plain ignorance. We must look deeper and wider to notice multiple
realities and be truly liberated!
Look again; our
tricolour has many more hues…
Reality has more extents
than the outward few!
~ Pravin K. Sabnis
