Monday 4 August 2014

Dream of Perfection- Nasra

We live in a society where a lot of importance is given to one’s perfect personality and how one can become an ideal character. People spend all their lives seeking perfection. 
I don’t intend to neglect the importance of perfection in our lives. All I want to state is that we run after perfection all our lives but we don’t even know its real meaning. Perfection is not how we walk, talk, eat or sleep. Neither is it flaunting your 99.9 percentile marks in an MBA entrance exam. I’m not saying that these things are not important but you can’t call a person perfect if he talks really well, is good in studies or walks like a show stopper model. It is about how you take things in real life.
If I put it this way, perfection is a way to live your life while you still care for others around you. Perfection is to make your parents smile even in their hardest of the day; it is to make your elder sister laugh with you even when she wants to scold her naughty sibling. Perfection is the urge to study when the circumstances are not really in your favour; it is the effort you make when even your parents have decided to give up on you finally. Perfection is to convey your message when others are not able to understand you properly. 



Here, I’m talking about one sweet little star of our Sarthak family whom we met on the very first day of our project “educaTE A CHild”- Nasra. She is the second youngest child in her family of 5 siblings. Her parents found her a very normal infant until she started speaking. She found it difficult even to speak a small 3 letter word. She used to stammer and her parents tried possible measures for a treatment. But their financial condition didn’t allow them to try hard enough. When we first met Nasra’s Ammi, she was looking as if she had almost given up on her.
Initially it was tough on Nasra to catch up with other kids in our class but gradually she started picking up words. Now after a year and half, with all her efforts and will power, she can speak most of the 4-5 letter words clearly without any hesitation. You can see clear confidence in her eyes which was not present on the day we met her first. Now Nasra shares her mother’s work at home, sometimes goes with her Abbu at work. She plays with her sisters and most of all she’s the one who takes care of her little brother Altaf, most of the time.
We see a perfect and confident lady growing up in Nasra with time. She’s the same shy girl who had never gone to school before and was afraid to speak with anyone. She was afraid that someone would make fun of her stammer. She still stammers now, but the difference is that now she knows that it’s not her fault and she’s working on this. She knows that one day she will get over this.
This is what I call perfection, a perfect combination of confidence, will power, hope, happiness, love, dreams, care and most of all the ability to accept the failure. She may not strike someone as an impressive perfect personality at first but if you go in detail, you will find the meaning of perfection in her. It’s not about how you present yourself to others, it’s only about how you see yourself and utilize your capabilities.

P.S: Our entire team had a healthy argument on "What Perfection is?". We would love if you shared your views too!