Compete but don’t compare
By: Mohd Ashraf
The times we live in are highly competitive and it’s getting tougher by each passing day. Students are worried about their position, grades and hardly place their concern on the actualisation of knowledge and wisdom. They simply want to make it to the top on the list at any cost and failing in doing so has repercussions- social, mental, and we all know what it looks like!
While there is no harm in a healthy competition and rather it is a good thing to prepare oneself on these lines, but the pressure and the social significance attached to it, sometimes makes it a dangerous trend. We have seen how such parental as well as social pressure sometimes results in young students ending up in either depression or even committing suicide.
Education plays a vital role in our lives and competition is inevitable when there are several students appearing in the same exams. Someone will top the exams while there will be students who fail. But contextualizing the scenario and giving the best try to an exam is all that we can do after hard work and dedication. One shouldn’t take this in a negative way and end up getting depressed with the results when there is always a second chance to better ones performance.
We are in this race of competition were everyone keeps running and if anyone fails to reach the finishing line they declared themselves as failures. Losing the race doesn’t implies that you are a failure and it is infact the key to your successful life only if you understands it properly and takes it in a proactive and positive way.
If you fail once or twice, you get to understand the situation better and formulate the strategy to work harder and then give your best try. Grades are necessary because it is going to ultimately decide whether you have the focus and dedication to strengthen your skill and improve your capability.
Your tackling of a failure decides your future. We have a wrong concept that our competitors are our friends, classmates or other student’s but in reality we are competing with none but ourselves. We have the winner as well as the loser inside ourselves though we often don’t realise it.
When we fail, we make our failures dominant over our winner phase while as we should try to keep our winner phase dominant over loser one. Students of this generation do not enjoy their childhood as they are buried under the burden of concern and unwanted worry and remain busy with their studies missing the opportunities to socialise. They alone are not responsible for this as parents, teacher and relatives are also contributing to this trend.
Students have taken studies as burden instead of pride. It should be taken as choice as education ought to teach us not only how to make a living but also how to live.
Kashmir Images is an English language daily newspaper published from Srinagar (J&K), India. The newspaper is one of the largest circulated English dailies of Kashmir and its hard copies reach every nook and corner of Kashmir Valley besides Jammu and Ladakh region.
