Sagar Shah

A kindergarten teacher decided to let her class play a game. The teacher told each child in the class to bring along a plastic bag containing a few potatoes. Each potato will be given a name of a person that the child hates, so the number of potatoes that a child will put in his/her plastic bag will depend on the number of people he/she hates. So when the day came, every child brought some potatoes with the name of the people he/she hated. Some had 2 potatoes; some 3 while some up to 5 potatoes. The teacher then told the children to carry with them the potatoes in the plastic bag wherever they go (even to the toilet) for one week. Days after days passed by, and the children started to complain due to the unpleasant smell let out by the rotten potatoes. Besides, those having 5 potatoes also had to carry heavier bags. After one week, the children were relieved because the game had finally ended. The teacher asked: "How did you feel while ...

There was a millionaire who was bothered by severe eye pain. He consulted so many physicians and was getting his treatment done. He did not stop consulting galaxy of medical experts; he consumed heavy loads of drugs and underwent hundreds of injections. But the ache persisted with great vigor than before. At last a monk who was supposed to be an expert in treating such patients was called for by the millionaire. The monk understood his problem and said that for some time he should concentrate only on green colors and not to fall his eyes on any other colors. The millionaire got together a group of painters and purchased barrels of green color and directed that every object his eye was likely to fall to be painted in green color just as the monk had directed. When the monk came to visit him after few days, the millionaire's servants ran with buckets of green paints and poured on him since he was in red dress, lest their master not see any ot...

Just as we can weatherproof a home by looking for cracks, leaks, and imperfections, we can also weatherproof our relationships, even our lives, by doing the very same thing. Essentially, weatherproofing means that you are on the careful lookout for what needs to be fixed or repaired. It’s finding the cracks and flaws, and either trying to fix them, or at least point them out to others. This tendency encourages you to think about what’s wrong with everything and everyone --- what you don’t like. You begin to notice little faults about your colleague (or friend, whoever), that you feel could be improved upon. You bring it to their attention. You might say, “You know, you sure have a tendency to be late.” Or, “I’ve noticed you don’t read very much.” The point is, you’ve begun what inevitably turns into a way of life --- looking for and thinking about what you don’t like about someone, or something that isn’t quite right. Obviously, an occasional ...

Many hundreds of years ago in a small Italian town, a merchant had the misfortune of owing a large sum of money to the moneylender. The moneylender, who was old and ugly, fancied the merchant's beautiful daughter so he proposed a bargain. He said he would forgo the merchant's debt if he could marry the daughter. Both the merchant and his daughter were horrified by the proposal. The moneylender told them that he would put a black pebble and a white pebble into an empty bag. The girl would then have to pick one pebble from the bag. If she picked the black pebble, she would become the moneylender's wife and her father's debt would be forgiven. If she picked the white pebble, she need not marry him and her father's debt would still be forgiven. But if she refused to pick a pebble, her father would be thrown into jail. They were standing on a pebble-strewn path in the merchant's garden. As they talked, the moneylender bent ove...

Sadly, many of us keep convincing ourselves, “Someday I’ll be happy.” We tell ourselves ‘I’ll behappy when I will be a president, when I will be doing so and so service, get a particular mobile phone’ etc. We convince ourselves that life will be better after we get married, then another, then another, on and on and on we go with our wish list. Meanwhile, life keeps moving forward. The truth is, there’s no better time to be happy than right now. If not now, when? Your life will always be filled with challenges. It’s best to admit this to yourself and decide tobe happy anyway. A wise man said, “For a long time it had seemed to me that life was about to begin – real life. But there was always some obstacle in the way, something to be got through first, some unfinished invention, a debt to be paid. Then life would begin. At last it dawned on me that these obstacles were my life.”