On this auspicious day of Ganesh Chaturthi, Team KYS is very happy to announce this new column that will be featured on our website every week – Monday Truclusions, written by one of our favorite stars – Ashwin Karthik.
“Truclusions” -The dictionary does not have any such word. But it is a journey everyone wants to embark on. A dream we all so want to live. To explain in simple words, it is a combination of two words. True and Inclusion together form “Truclusion”, and hence Monday Truclusions is an attempt to write a new page in the history of inclusion. What better day to begin this wonderful journey than the auspicious day of the Ganesha Chaturthi, as He is remembered at the beginning of everything.
But when I say inclusion, why am I addressing all of us?
Isn’t inclusion a reserved word for people with one or the other limitation?
It applies to all, because no one in this creation is perfect. All of us will feel weak or limited at one point in time or the other. At the same time, we all have certain strengths too; we all are definitely good at something. All we need to do is discover our strength and set out to achieve the pinnacle of excellence in what we choose to do.
Like life, true inclusion is also a journey not less enthralling than a roller-coaster ride. Yes we might fall, we might fail, but it doesn’t matter because if we haven’t failed in life, it only means that we haven’t tried to do anything new. At the end of the day, what matters is whether we made an attempt to get back on our feet after we fell, or we were apprehensive and scared of falling again and kept away from trying.
As they say, charity begins at home, and inclusion has to begin with the self.
So the first step in this journey of inclusion has to be acceptance. Only when we accept the reality of the situation, can we move on in life and make our own identity.
The point I am trying to make here is that inclusion as most think or describe is not an initiative or something that applies to a section of the society. It is a necessity of the society we live in. It hurts all of us when we feel deprived of something we deserve to be a part of. And it is true that the most basic but also the most important thing in life is to feel happy of one’s own existence. That doesn’t happen as long as we don’t feel included.
No two people are the same. Therefore, the experiences they undergo also can never be the same. We all have different challenges; all of us have faced situations where we feel helpless or sad, when we feel the need of a hand to hold us, someone who could stand by us. That is the time we need our family, our kin, to stand by us. But family or a group of friends can make one stronger only to a certain extent.
Real strength comes when communities come together
A small example of the same is one of the Ganesha festivals that my family celebrated in my childhood. I was diagnosed as a Cerebral palsy quadriplegic (subset of spastic cerebral palsy that affects all four limbs both arms and legs). It was difficult for me to offer flowers and other things to the deity. So my family thought of a creative workaround to include me in the festivities. My father brought another small idol of the deity. It was decorated just like the big idol and it was decided that all the rituals that were performed for the big idol will be performed for the small idol as well.
Yes there might be an argument that bringing a smaller idol for me could also be seen as a kind of discrimination. But it was only my family’s adaptation to bring a smile on my face. A family’s attempt to make a child happy in any righteous way is only fair. To make me more comfortable, my parents would invite all the kids in the locality to our house to celebrate the festivities. This is only one example of the many ways in which my family learned to think out of the box to prove the saying, “Necessity is the Mother of Invention”.
I hope you liked the first read of my first article. Before I sign off, I promise I’ll be back with more of my experiences on “Monday Truclusions” next week!