Moral Short Story from School – She gave me the toffee!
Photo credit: Jusben from morguefile.com
Our Hindi teacher, Mrs.V.Bhasin, was strict enough to keep all of us scared all the times. Every day we used to pray in the morning that,”Oh God! Bhasin Madam should not come to school today. She must take frequent offs.”
One very fine day of November, 1998 she started scolding the entire class for our non-serious attitude towards the studies. She kept reminding us that we are board-class students & for next five months or so we all must concentrate only on our studies & nothing else. And in the middle of all this she asked me to show her my homework note-book. I got even more petrified & felt that I would faint because that day I was sitting on the first most bench of the row.
Somehow I mustered all my courage & handed over my notebook to her. She opened it & started looking at the pages. And then she stopped at one of the pages & started staring at the answers. She asked me,”Have you written all these answers on your own or did you copy them from some guide or reference book?” God only knew what happened to me at that very moment & I immediately answered her question. I said, “Madam! I wrote some of the answers on my own & some of them I had copied from the guide.” This made her really furious.
She stared hard at me & said, “You shameless girl! From where you got the guts to accept that you copied the answers from guide. You are fooling yourself because copying from guide or somewhere else won’t help you ever in your life. If you had any problems or doubts then why didn’t you come to me for the help?”
I said, “Madam! I did want to come but I was too scared of you to approach you for the help & guidance”.
She even got angrier & I felt that now I would be receiving her million dollar slap on my cheek. But all thanks to the almighty god that it didn’t happen. She shouted at me & said, “Am I a monster? I wouldn’t have eaten you if you had come to me to solve your problems & doubts. What’s the problem with all you students? Very recently a class10th student’s mother told me that her son is too scared of me to approach me for any kind of help. I scold you people for your betterment.”
Then she again looked back at me & said,”I am sparing you this time because you openly admitted your mistake of copying the answers from the guide but next time you copy any answers from any kind of reference book I will tear your notebook into two pieces.” I promised her that I won’t copy again. And before she could have said a word further the lunch bell rang. I felt so relieved but at the same time I kept my face expressionless. She got up & moved out of the classroom .
Thereafter I & my classmates also moved out. The moment I came out she said,”You had got enough scolding for today. Now have this toffee & enjoy.” I & my classmates got stunned because none of us had ever come across this aspect of her personality. However I took the toffee from her & left for the canteen with my friends. But after this incident we saw some minor changes in her behavior towards us .She was a bit soft & little more patient towards us. And yes I also kept my promise & still living with it.
This incident taught me the three most important lifetime lessons. The first lesson is that if we have made a mistake knowingly or unknowingly we should admit it, should apologize to the person concerned who had got hurt of it & try our best not to repeat it ever in our life .Secondly we should not copy. Habit of copying is actually nothing but we make a fool of ourselves & it definitely leads us towards our self-destruction. We lose the original we. And the last lesson (but not the least) is that we should speak out the problems & issues. We should address them to the person concerned because we can’t get the issues or problems solved unless we complained about them as keeping silent or keep waiting for things to get right is not a solution at all.
