Knowledge – the more you know, you realize how less you know. Some great scholar chose to think different and attempted to pen down this phrase. And isn’t it true? Yes it is. Knowledge is in every single atom of progressive life. Having a negative say doesn’t make you cynical as long as it is only an opinion and not an axiom. In fact, an opinion is the root to a debate. With every debate flows a plethora of ideas. And with every idea, generates an axiom.
With this positive approach in the camouflage of pessimism, I happened to challenge the limits of a stanza passed by a close friend of mine, which goes like this:
"Be as a bird, perched on a frail branch
that she feels bending beneath her.
Still she sings away all the same,
knowing that she has wings"
Now, on a pretty ordinary approach, this stanza would raise the altitude of confidence in a demoralized individual. What it means is that one should be as smart as a bird that sits on the delicate branch which the bird sees bending beneath her. But that doesn’t bother her and she continues to sing as she knows that even if the branch breaks she can fly.
But, can this statement be challenged? Again, yes, it can.
I did look to act cocky in the beginning with my first question being, isn’t the bird (who represents an individual) over confident about herself? She thinks that she is special & that she doesn’t bother about any branch breaking because she has options in other branches. She is proud about her flying skills that she just ignores the fact that she is a living being & need to struggle to survive in every day of her life. She is not cautious about that hunter who can gun her down even in her flight.
The stanza felt incomplete to me & I voiced my opinion. I might be rhetoric here and might give anybody a feeling that I am reading in between lines. But, it is a thought that is different from the usual & I wanted a justification in revert.
A subtle reply came as expected, in the support of the bird. My friend feels that the over-smartness or the ego quotient never was in the picture. It is unadorned sharp & smart thinking that if the branch breaks, the bird won’t fall and die like most other living beings. And that the saying should be taken word by word to make sense to the common man & not by doubting it’s shallowness. On further provocation & resistance from my end, the debate seemed to go haywire & turned out to be an agitation with personal issues popping up in between. It was time to shift gears backwards. So I thought of mellowing down & blankly opined the bird to be pretentious.
My friend maturely placed her belief that all people are not similar and that they think differently. She never budged from her stance on the bird & added another brick to her wall of support for the flying being. She not only described the bird as an inspiration but also used her as an example to estimate my strengths & weaknesses. The bottomline remained that the bird wouldn’t dare to sit on the branch had it not known how to fly.
Now this was a statement that looks corrected. It not only makes the ego factor of the bird disappear but also portrays the strength of the bird. As for me, I presented the possible weaknesses of the bird that she should be cautious about.
The beauty of the debate is when two conflicting opinions collide to make a productive statement and needless to say, the effort was worthwhile.
