Again and again and again!

Many years ago, a wonderful series was aired on “Doordarshan”, the only Hindi channel of an era when Netflix and Prime videos were yet a thought in the womb.

This was the time when mobile phones hadn’t made their presence felt so dramatically, there were no hankerings of social media, computers were in their nascent stage and families still sat together to dine, surrounded by bouts of laughter and lots of sharing and bickering around the dining table.



So, circling back to the said series. It was called “Udaan” (flight) and was the story of a girl, who was born in an affluent family of landlords, but due to the mysterious workings of fate, found herself and her family stung by the bug of poverty. The tale goes on to reveal how from a young girl, she steps into adolescence and then goes on to achieve her dream of becoming a superintendent of police.

So it’s basically the story of her trysts and tribulations and is narrated and presented in a very interesting and appealing manner.



The point of bringing up that story here is a dialogue from that series. That one single dialogue, rather that one single line has stayed with me over the years and has unconsciously and surreptitiously became my life’s mantra whenever I stumbled upon a problem.

The scene unfolds with the girl’s father, who used to be a landlord, and due to a cruel turn of fate has now become a daily wage farmer in his own lands. He is shown ploughing the field with the young heroine in tow. She tries to help her father in whatever way she can. So when her father sees a huge boulder in the middle of the field, he steps away from the bullocks he is guiding and tries to remove the huge rock from the way. The little child also tries to help him, but the boulder is too big and too heavy for them. After some time, they both sit down panting. She turns to her father and says, “What if the boulder doesn’t budge?” To which her father replies, “Then we will try harder again…till the time that it moves!”




And this single line transforms the girl’s scowl into a smile and fills her with renewed energy. Eventually, after lots and lots and lots of effort, father and daughter are able to move the rock and pave the way for the bullocks to keep on ploughing the field.




Don’t we all need this very line in our lives ever so often?

To try and try and try and try till we succeed?

As even if we don’t get the desired result, at least we will learn the many ways that the task could not be done. There is no failure in life, just lessons on how something cannot be done. Failure is when we put down the arms and refuse to fight.


As Lord Krishna says in Geeta that the job of human-being is to do their karma by giving their hundred percent. That is all there is in their hands, as the result is in the Lord’s hands. So why worry about something that isn’t within our power? Why not do whatever there is and do it to the best of our ability?




Because as the saying goes, “It isn’t over till it’s over!”