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Unique Magical Raincoat

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This is a story of an eight year old boy named Raghav. He was left in an orphanage by his relatives after the untimely demise of his parents in an unfortunate accident. Due to incessant torture handed to him inside the orphanage, he gathered some courage and ran away from the confinement.

He had no other choice but to spend his nights on local platforms. He managed to befriend two small kids named Ramya and Jaggu engaged in boot polishing on those platforms. These two kids were instrumental in bringing some sort of normalcy back to the life of Raghav.

Now Raghav was also gainfully employed like his other two friends. But he was badly missing his school days. With each passing days even the memories of his good old days with his parents were getting more and more blurred. But somehow he had managed to make peace with himself by stop asking the question “why me”.

One night it was raining cats and dogs. And Raghav was hopelessly waiting for some customer since morning. It was half past ten in the night. But just when he was about to call it a day, he witnessed a middle aged lady in a raincoat disembarking from the train way before the train could come to the halt. She seemed to be gathering some serious pace as soon as she managed to land herself safely on the platform.

Two men were following her so zealously that it seemed as if the lady was about to spill the beans to their respective wives regarding their extramarital affairs . But, one of the two men was carrying a sharp knife and it definitely looked like some serious matter. So sensing the gravity of the situation Raghav didn’t waste any time in waking up the two stray dogs that had became his best companion during his brief stay at platform and directed them towards those two menacing men. The incessant barking by those two dogs did the trick and made sure that those menacing men were vanished from the scene.

The lady in distress wished to thank Raghav for his quick act of bravery. But Raghav was very reluctant in accepting any reward for his act. Therefore as a token of love and gratitude the lady gifted Raghav her own raincoat. It was quite an ordinary looking raincoat.

However the secret of the raincoat got disclosed to Raghav in due course of time. And as a result all his small materialistic needs were taken care of. Since he had a golden heart he was more than willing to help other folks. Even his friend Jaggu and Ramya were regular beneficiaries of his magnanimity, but at the same time the palpable inquisitiveness about Raghav was constantly bugging them.

And one night they succeeded in following Raghav to an isolated and dilapidated location behind unused tracks. They couldn’t believe their eyes when they saw Raghav pulling ten rupees currency from his magical raincoat by just putting hand in its left pocket and finally making a neat bundle of it. Once Raghav left that place Ramya got hold of that precious raincoat and three different bundles of currency kept inside the broken drainage pipe.

It was half past midnight and they just vanished in the darkness. After running continuously for more than two kilometre they finally halted around the corner of nearest beach. Ramya was in a hurry to put on the raincoat and check the magic himself, but was not able to pull anything out of the pocket. Even Jaggu couldn’t do the trick after putting on the raincoat. So in sheer frustration Jaggu threw the raincoat into the sea. Since it was high tide, within seconds the raincoat was nowhere to be seen.

Although deeply infuriated Ramya couldn’t do much as none of the two knew swimming. He felt very helpless, but then he suddenly realised that he still had three bundles of currency. Immediately he took one bundle out of his pocket and started counting. It was an amount of ten thousand rupees. Then he took out the second bundle. Meanwhile Jaggu too got excited and asked for the third bundle so that he could also contribute in counting. But Ramya didn’t wish to take any chances with the stupidity of Jaggu, so he continued with his task of counting the second bundle. But as soon as he reached midway he found a slip of paper. It had three entries:

1: Rs. 10000 for operation of Ramya’s mother.
2: Rs. 11000 for the marriage of Jaggu’s sister.
3: Rs. 8000 for establishment of tea stall for Ramya and Jaggu.

My take on the story: Every person on this earth is gifted with a unique magical raincoat but the problem is the conspicuous absence of faith and confidence in it. Based on this fact, it becomes quite easy to categorise people into the following three types.

1: The one who is blissfully unaware that he/she is actually blessed with a unique magical raincoat. They simply keep blaming the nature for doing grave injustice to them.

2: The one who has accidentally stumbled upon this unique gift, but is simply unable to build that faith within himself that this unique gift is going to be there with him till he possesses unwavering faith in his own capabilities. AS a result the person fails to appreciate the actual value of his gift and starts treating it as a one time phenomenon and ends up becoming very insecure about his own unique gift.

3: The one who feels exceedingly blessed to be the recipient of nature’s unique gift. The underlying faith within these men are so rock solid that even the most worst adversity of life fails miserably in arousing the feeling of insecurity and fear among these men.

Quite a lot of us do fall into the second category. Because after acquiring the so called skilled set through years of dedicated education we have a tendency to start believing that the only set of unique gift bestowed upon us is confined within the boundaries of those acquired skill set. And as a result we try our level best to extract the maximum materialistic benefits out of that gift of skill. In the process we lose the sanity that there is absolutely no need to hoard all the benefits that could be extracted at any given point of time. We just need to have the faith that every possible need of ours will be taken care of by the nature.

And if we do succeed in inculcating all the requisite faith and are sincerely willing to invest some time and energy in finding our true self, it would be far easier for us to make the transition from the second to third category. And believe me this is the only and ultimate transition ever needed so that we could fulfil the potential of our unique and magical existence.

I would love to hear about your take on the story. Please do share it in the comment section.

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    • Hi…I am really glad that you liked the post. If you do find any value in it, Please do share it with your friends on your social platform.

      Lots of Love
      Piyush