The Phoenix of Trust

Societies are driven by purposes. People are called a society when they have a collective purpose. That purpose can be religious, scientific, cultural, political or something else. Humans tend to identify with the societies as they provide us with a sense of belongingness. But what drives these societies? Is it the larger than life heroes that all societies tend to identify and follow? Or is it the grassroot, who with their phoenix like qualities,  tend to rise again everytime they are battered and defeated? My vote goes to the latter one. And the reason for that is that i have just had a very humbling experience of meeting an amazing phoenix of a person. And that person happens to be my friend's dad.

It started with all my friends deciding to leave the city and visit their respective homes at the same weekend. So me and this friend were the only guys left in the town. And this friend, out of his own sweet and caring self, invited me stay over at his home with his family for a day. Now I have been to his home before too but mostly got talking to his mom as his dad used to leave for work early in the morning and come back late in the night only. But this saturday morning i got a chance to talk to his dad as he was getting ready to leave for work. He was telling me how he started this shoe shop on his own, right from the construction of building when he used to stand there in nasty Chennai heat and get everything done and used to come back at midnights only. And all this when he was nearly 60 years of age when most people take a backseat and play golf or turn to god. The venture was not a purely enterpreneurial one per se,  but the spark in his eyes while telling all this was not dimmed by this fact.

In the evening I was telling my friend about this conversation i had with his dad and this friend started telling me the difficulties his dad had to face because of his trusting nature. This man was comfortably working in Dubai, the family had a good lifestyle and the future of the kids was secure. But as luck would have it, the partner whom his father trusted decided to flee with all the moolah. The family had to wind up everything in Dubai and come back to Chennai. As if the mishaps in Dubai were not enough, his dad's own siblings turned their backs towards him when he needed them the most. How badly his trust must have shattered, thats for his telling, but its not easy for anyone to recover from such a turn of events. So the family had difficult times both on the financial and emotional front. But his dad never lost his trust in the world around. As good things happen to good people and bad things happen only to make good people better, the crisis blew away. And that was because there were some people around who believed in goodness, stood for it and invested in it so that again the phoenix of trust could fly. I was moved to tears when my friend told me that during the crisis his dad stopped raising his voice at both the children for the reason that he thought he had no right to do so when he himself was not doing anything significant in his life. You were wrong sir! You were doing something very significant, something that has helped your children become what they are today. You were teaching them an excellent lesson in self respect. How courageous a man could be to purposely induce a sense of detachment with his own children? And let me tell you that both the kids have done him very proud by becoming successful in their fields.

The point i wanted to arrive at through this incident is that people who trust in this big bad world are mocked upon. We are constantly fed with the information that this world is being run by the whole motley of schemers, who misuse the trusting people for their trust in the world. But I think that trust is the only glue that helps the socities thrive. You travel in trains and buses with the trust that the person sitting next to you is not wearing a bomb. But shouldn't you learn a lesson when your trust has been breached not once but twice? Are you not ending up being a loser by everytime being at the receiving end of it? I beg to differ. I think the trusting people are at a winning position in all respects. They trust and hence push the ball in the world's court leaving it up to the world to decide what it wants to do with it. They trust again and again thinking that might be someday, the world will return their goodness. That one day their trust won't be breached because the world will be too tired to do the same thing again and again. That one day they would have achieved what they set out to achieve.

I request all of the Phonixes of trust out there, never to stop trusting because the socities thrive on you and you all definitely make this world a better place to live in.