They swum about in the water ,tightly packed,skirting the seaweeds by a gentle movement of their fins,those ambiguously coloured fish ,which might have been orange or silver.One out of them one was a friend of Johnathan Livingstone, or so she liked to say.They weren't really on such intimate terms but she had once watched him during one of his great flights and worshipped him ever since.
Wanting desperately to be like him she relentlessly practised till she was weary to the bone and then practised some more.That sort of devotion is bound to pay off and soon she could swim backward ,with her tail pointed skywards, spinning around in circles all the while.All very complicated and useless of course but she enjoyed it and by then Johnathan had become something of a legend and she being his follower had to be given some amount of grudging respect.Besides, she was undoubtedly quite talented for a fish of her age.
All was going well but that itself is an ominous sentence and we didn't need to be told that SOMETHING was soon going to happen.It did ,but maybe we shouldn't call it a tragedy for after all some good did come of it.Hidden qualities were ,no matter what you say, discovered.
Old story,a fisherman caught the school in its net and they all died.but the tale of our fish doesn't end there.They were loaded into refrigerators till they looked glassy eyed and coldly dead and were then sent off to markets from where they were bought by families for lunch or dinner ,or whatever.At one dinner table the family took their first bite of our special fish and then spat it out.All hard and tasteless, they said.And so it was thrown away.The other one which turned out to be delicious had once been a silly little fish ,who simpered and giggled ,was nice but not very bright ,her companions had always felt.But this family of course did not know that (though I wonder if they would have cared if they had)and they waxed eloquent about the qualities of that fresh fish.While Johnathan's probable successor lay half eaten in the dustbin.
For those who missed it,this story has a moral.It teaches us that apparently useless people might have hidden virtues .....
or maybe,
it teaches us something else altogether.
PS.one question,i need to know if the message came through..do tell.
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in this rush to think out of the box ,I forgot to see whats inside.
4 comments:
But the hidden qualities of dumb but tasty fish didn't matter to her. They weren't qualities she wasnted to have. So i guess you should be grateful for what you do have, and not look at the fortunes of others. there.
u feel some sort of kinship with that fish .eh topshe?
running to its defence all of a sudden..
the whole thing is pointless. and that a fish aspiring to be a seagull is dumb, but that's besides the point. which is that's it's all pointless and worth half a non- tasty fish in a dustbin.
sorry, utterly useless comment.
but i like, because of the sounds-like-you-narrating-in-my-head language and all.
very joyeeta-esque cynicism. all i learnt was that being good and extraordinarly brilliant at anything doesn't necessarily get you much. how delicious.
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