Inspirational Short Story – Girl in the City
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My teacher had told me that each day is an opportunity to learn new things. But today I learnt nothing; it was too tedious and boring, the young girl thought. She was a student of theatre. She learned drama from a man called Pavan. They had their classes in one of the cities in North India. Now it is vacation and they are here in this hopeless part of the world, Kannur, South India, she thought. She felt there was nothing new to learn from here. Her teacher had advised that as an actor one should observe the surroundings, the people and the nature and learn from them. That is where inspiration comes from, her teacher had said. She knew her teacher’s wisdom never failed. She had personal experiences from other cities of confronting inspiration in the form of people, events, and a sort of invisible presence near her. But this city is very much dried of inspiration, as if the people here lost their souls to ordinariness, and they have no desire for anything new.
She reached the hotel where her teacher and she stayed. She knocked the room. The teacher opened the door. Sensing her distress the man asked: “how was your trip?”
“It was no good. I wandered around the city but met nothing new, may be due to the fact that I am born and brought up here. But even after my staying all these three years away with you, I could not find any change to the city. Every thing is the same, the same people, the same streets, the same dry weather, and even the same events every where, as if the city is caught within a cycle of endless repetition.” She said while settling herself in to a sofa, situated at the centre of the room.
The man came near her, and said: “you might be right, dear, but you failed to notice one thing. You missed an important lesson. This city taught you that there are places from which you learn nothing. Be grateful to the city for teaching you this wisdom. This happens in every turn of our lives. We meet people, travel to distant places, expecting greatly from them to teach us some worthwhile lessons, but sometimes they disappoint us by communicating nothing but silence and filling us with boredom. And we curse ourselves and the decision that we had made to travel such a distance, ignoring completely the greatest lesson they teach us: there is not a place, not a person that cannot teach us anything. But what we learn is completely upon ourselves, on how we learn it, and on how successfully we interpret the lesson for us.”
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