Successes and failures come turn-wise in life. And therein lays its beauty. Imagine a life that is strewn with successes alone with no trace of failure. How drab it would be. Especially if you are born with an adventurous side to you, you are little bothered with the end result, for the sheer joy of the process keeps you going, in full steam.When success comes after a long day, having given your best and slogged day in day out, it holds meaning. It gives a fillip to your floundering humility which had earlier been dented because of the competitive agility and the frenzy of winning. Husky voice of the winner gets sweetened after finding ground beneath his feet.
Humility sits pretty on a victor. After having shouted his lungs out during the contest, his aggressiveness gets subdued when crowned with the trophy. His playfulness that kept the public bemused and amused settles into a somber state. If earlier he was a blatant player of the mind games, now he plays more tacitly, with a truckload of subtleness.Now he gets more patient with the unreasonable claims made by his opponents coz he knows full well that he has grabbed the throne and the King is bound to display restraint for it’s a mark of his kingliness. Such is the impact of success that it brings about a makeover in the man. Father of the English essay, Francis Bacon, was right when he said “Nothing succeeds like success.” Nothing matters more than success, or so does it appear. The change that follows is so stark. A successful man, when he deservingly reaches the top slot of his profession, becomes a paragon of modesty.
Now the put-downs lose their significance because he is assured of his place in the galaxy of stars. He knows what he is capable of. Now he can tolerate the raves and rants of those standing on the other side of the fence. He knows that the frustrations will be vented and the angst will be spilled. He keeps his calm after having secured the zenith. Envied by the also-rans, he makes every effort to show his magnanimity. He may sound superfluous or superlative but irrespective of his sound bytes, he betrays a deep sense of assurance that shoots up his image.
His rivals fall flat and become a victim of their own frailties. They leave no stone unturned to turn the turtle but with every measly maneuver they lick the dust and make their position even more vulnerable. What failure does worst is that it takes the sense of judgment from its victim. It blindfolds the person and cripples him to the extent that he fails to distinguish between right and wrong. Wronged as he feels, he loses his self respect and mouths irrelevant and baseless points to put his case in front of discerning audience. The result is anybody’s guess. The best thing that success does is that it moderates a person who otherwise sounds rowdy and untamed. And the worst failure does is that it brings out the worst in man who finds it difficult to contain his shortcomings.
His one lacuna leads to another with a spiraling effect to it. One catastrophe takes in its humongous fold many more and it seems endless.The best and the worst of these unlikely twins deserve extensive research by the social scientists to arrive at a premise that can attribute agreeable reasons to the anomaly.The more you absorb, the more you want to absorb because the human nature throws open such unanticipated antics that every time there is a need to explore deep into the expanse of ‘why so’ and ‘how come.’