I still remember the days when I was just opening my eyes to the outer world. It was then, I read a Bengali poem by Sunirmal Basu. And in that the lines were like - The sky taught me generosity, and the blowing wind - workaholism. And rest of the poem was all about teachers in nature, or should I say, external factors that infuse learnings in our soul. We learn from not only our school teachers or college professors. We learn from objects, events and almost anything we come across in our daily life - vivacious or inanimate. We just need to keep our eyes open. As we see we learn, and experience bears wisdom. So in a way, we should be more open to the outer world in order to become wiser.
And it's true about learning words as well. Any word I know has a definite story linked with it - the story of how I learnt it. Learning is no herculean task. Of course, at first it may not seem so. When I first saw this word - Herculean, I was bamboozled. I then mugged up the meaning - extremely difficult or something that need superhuman strength. Now, last week I visited Science City, and on the wall of the front most building there was an artwork depicting the story. A heroic figure fighting with a snake-like creature with many heads. And when I came back and was enquiring what they wanted to depict on that wall, I heard one more story - Hercules was a Greek fighter who performed 12 immense labours one of which was to kill Hydra - a multiheaded creature. But the difficlut most part of it was everytime it was beheaded, two new heads were regenerated. And the glimpse of this great fight was there on the wall. Would it be hard any more for me to remember the word and it's meaning? At least I don't have to damn mug it up.
I was hesitating whether I should tell you one more story my teacher told me in my childhood. Although I have plenty of them, giving them all would increase contents of this gibberish, and you may not like me spoiling your precious time. Whereas I am too avid to use it. In short I am tantalized - annoyed by this hesitation - to give or not to give. And finally I decide I must tell you what happened to King Tantalus for stealing ambrosia from Gods. Tantalus's punishment for his act was to stand in a pool of water beneath a fruit tree with low branches. Whenever he reached for the fruit, the branches raised his intended meal from his grasp. Whenever he bent down to get a drink, the water receded before he could get any. His name gave birth to this peculiar sort of annoyance - a temptation without satisfaction - tantalize.
In one of my favourite project speeches in KTM, I heard a fellow Toastmaster narrating a story at the begining of her speech. It was the story of a word. Many words combine to make an interesting story, while each word has an interesting story of itself. And when you know it, learning is nothing but fun. You no longer feel that a good vocabulary is your Achilles' heel. In one of our meeting we had a speech marathon, and our Grammarian aptly presented Marathon as the word of the day and explained the story behind its meaning. In an other meeting a very senior Toastmaster used the word Nudge quite a few time. He read it in a book. I searched for the same book on internet and found out its cover. It was so expressive that just by viewing it you can understand and assimilate the meaning.
I have learnt from almost anything, - right from the interesting links in my friends' tweets, to status messages (nice quotes and quips) of my mentor's google account - from road side advertisements to the cover packs of ordinary consumer goods. We all actually do it in our own distinct ways. But above all, what we see is what we be. And that's why the saying goes, we are average of 5 people we meet everyday.
