Childhood prattlings

I was in the habit of making mountains out of molehills

If we could rewind our lives back to our childhoods, there would certainly be many amusing conversations that would be worth mentioning.

As I recollect those days, I realise how bedtime stories played a whimsical role in my life. My father had a humungous collection of stories with him that he used in place of lullabies. Just before I fell asleep, the bedtime rule was to quote the moral of the story.

Once he narrated the story of the four bulls and a lion. Once upon a time, there lived four bulls, who were the thickest of friends. A lion wishing for a hearty meal tried to attack them. However, since they were united, they were able to drive away the lion. To cut a long story short, after breaking their friendship it was easy for the lion to gobble them up.

Now comes the most important part of the story narration – the moral. Pat came the reply, “we should not eat bulls” as against the good old Panchatantra moral “United we Stand, Divided we fall”. A loud roar of laughter from my father is what I could remember before I fell asleep.

Now, my account does not end there. When the same story was narrated to my nephew, it seems pat came the reply, “We should not eat at all”. Well! He is a “picky eater”, you see!

I reckon that we should narrate the good old story to other toddlers. Maybe, you might get sensational morals from them too.

Let me give you another interesting instance, which happened in my life when I was around three years old. One day, the school had issued a circular in the form of a paper pinned to everyone’s uniform. I had somehow missed the circular while returning back home and had failed to understand its contents. I had realized that the circular was missing only when the cycle rickshaw man dropped me back home. One cannot imagine the ruckus I had created.

Even the cycle rickshaw man was so alarmed by my tantrum, that he pedalled all the way up to the school looking for the paper but in vain! My parents had immediately called up the school asking for the contents of the circular. It seems that the circular was so trivial that the principal had a nice laugh at my innocence and assured my parents that it was nothing so serious after all!

I had made a mountain of a molehill, hadn’t I?