A bus ride, a begging singer and me: How I discovered gratitude?

-

 

A bus ride, a begging singer and me: How I discovered gratitude?

By
Priyambda Samanta Ray (Sem I, 2023)

 



Sourced from: http://joannasokolowska.com/product/grateful/ 

This week from the very beginning itself has been enlightening for me. But the particular thing that I have noticed is that this week is leaning towards making me feel more grateful for everything.

Gratitude is a very underrated but effective gesture that anyone can show. Gratitude not only makes the receiving end happy but also the offering end, it’s not just happiness a person feels when someone is grateful to them but also helps them to love themselves a little more, make a happy memory, release dopamine, and ensures mental stability by relieving them, makes them feel important. Just some genuine words of gratefulness or gratitude have so much effect then why not just say it?

Let me begin with the incident that made me write this…I was on a bus, halfway to my destination. I was sitting on the seat designated only for ladies, and suddenly a child rode on the bus sitting in front of my seat. He was looking like a 10-13-year-old child with two bags around his neck. One of them was big and looked heavy another was small that could be used to keep money in it. After one minute or so he took out a remote from the small money purse-like bag and turned on the music system which was in the big bag, for once, I thought that there were books in it. He started playing songs on that system followed by his singing. I won’t say that he was a good singer and I was impressed by his singing rather it was amusing for me, the child sang some good minutes then started begging. The attitude that he was roaming on the bus was something that I can’t explain but there was self-confidence in that boy that made me inspired and somewhere grateful for the life I am living. It is winter now though the boy was so poorly dressed making money by singing in any voice whatsoever is appreciable.

I would like all the readers who are reading this to write down anything that you are grateful for, it can be anything big and can be anything small like the fact that you are alive and kicking.

The things that I am grateful for are…………...

I am grateful for the very fact that the life I am living now is someone’s ideal life.

I am grateful for having such a wonderful family and parents who provide me with every reasonable need of mine.

I am grateful for being born without any deformities.

I am grateful for living without any big accidents.

I am grateful to those who taught me that I can get everything that I believe in and work for.

I am grateful to those people who made me realize that I can’t get everything I wish for.

I am also grateful to myself for the way I have carried myself every time I faced any challenges.

I am grateful for having a father who gives me foresight, the knowledge that he has gained via experience, and the strength to face the problem.

I am grateful for having a mother who gives me mental stability, and a sense of security and has solutions for my every problem.

I am thankful for the very opportunity to live this life.

I am grateful that I can think of the future and look forward.

I am grateful to have hot food on my table on a winter day.

The purpose I am writing this is because sometimes we just run after the things that we want so much that we forget that we have so much with us.

I would love to say this to all who are reading this – THANK YOU for reading this article. If you understood the motive behind it THANK YOU. And at last, you all are beautiful, lovable, and accepted so THANKS A LOT FOR YOUR BEING.

 

 Ethnographic Experience

Click here for a PDF copy of the article


Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Tarak Chandra Das: the worst sufferer of academic amnesia in Indian Anthropology

-
Image
  Tarak Chandra Das: The worst sufferer of academic amnesia in Indian Anthropology by Prof. Abhijit Guha Amnesia The celebrated sociologist and social anthropologist André Béteille in one of his articles published in the Sociological Bulletin in 1997 wrote: In India, each generation of sociologists seems eager to start its work on a clean slate, with little or no attention to the work done before. This amnesia about the work of their predecessors is no less distinctive of Indian sociologists than their failure to innovate (Béteille 1997:98).   Béteille’s observation on Indian sociologists however, was not novel. About twenty five years before his pronouncement a doyen of Indian anthropology, Surajit Sinha in his insightful article published in the Journal of the Indian anthropological Society (hereafter JIAS ) observed that despite considerable growth in research publications and professional manpower in social and cultural anthropology during the last 100 years th...
Read more

Public anthropology in practice

-
Image
  Public anthropology in practice   By Prof. Abhijit Guha     BACKGROUND   A.L. Kroeber (1876-1960) in his essay Eighteen Professions published in the American Anthropologist in 1915 began with two interesting paragraphs. I quote:   Anthropology today includes two studies which fundamental differences of aim and method render irreconcilable. One of those branches is biological and psychological; the other, social or historical (Kroeber 1915).   The second paragraph starts with a more interesting sentence, which runs as follows:   There is a third field, the special province of anthropology, concerned with the relation of biological and social factors. This is no-man’s land, and therefore used as a picnic-ground by whosoever prefers pleasure excursions to the work of cultivating a patch of understanding. Some day this tract will also be surveyed, fenced and improved (Ibid).   Yes, Kroeber was right and he came ...
Read more

National colloquium on "Metamorphoses of the Political: Voices from the Margins of West Bengal"

-
Image
  The Department of Anthropology in collaboration with ICAS:MP or the M.S. Merian - R. Tagore International Centre of Advanced Studies - an Indo-German research Collaboration has organised a two-day research colloquim "Metamorphoses of the Political: Voices from the Margins of West Bengal".  The concept note is as follows The department was fortunate enough to get some of the most important intellectual personalities working on West Bengal today. See below. However, they have worked as discussants to improve already well researched articles prepared by a bunch of young scholars on the caste questions see below: The department is indebted to all the committee members (as follows): The aim of this workshop was to go beyond the two major theoretical positions, first, the Bengal exceptionalism which claims that caste question is never the political dynamics of West Bengal, and second, a conception that caste question ends at Matua or Rajbanshi movements only. Instead the paper pr...
Read more