The Story behind the Prize

You know what’s the most happening thing in Kerala these days. Well, it’s an interesting ‘event’ known as load shedding. For the uninitiated, load shedding is a benevolent initiative of the State Government (or more precisely, KSEB) for the promotion of family welfare activities. How do they do that? Pretty simple. They cut the electricity supply during those peak hours when housewives will be busy watching mega serials, teenagers will be listening to music systems, kids will be playing computer games, geeks will be studying their asses off, jobless people will be blogging about how the state government promotes family welfare activities, etc etc etc. When there’s no electricity, these ‘busy’ people lights a candle and gathers around it. Since no one has anything else to do, they start chatting and sharing stories, and it will be like a family get-together. Voila, objective accomplished. Seriously man, think about it, though the government intends to lower power consumption, it really brings about some family bonding. It was during one of those load sheddings that dad told us one of his personal anecdotes. Here it goes:

Nine years back, dad was a guest scientist in Clemson University for about a year. Now, Clemson is a small town in South Carolina and there was a local church where dad lived which organized a multitude of social activities like picnics, outdoor games, sports competitions, and stuff like that. The people were really friendly and always insisted that dad join these activities. He did, but there was this sport meet organized by them, and though dad initially hesitated to participate in it, was persistently insisted to join them. So off went dad to a 3 kms race, in which they had to run 1.5 km to a particular point and then come back to the starting line, to finish the race. The race started and the competitors sped ahead of dad leaving him behind. Dad was 47 at that time, so imagine the plight of running 3 kms with all these people. After about half a kilometer, dad stopped and rested for a while; then started running back. As soon as he approached the finishing line, the crowd started clapping and cheering. Dad kept saying that he didn’t run full length and there has been mistake, but amidst the chaos there, no one really listened. The other runners came after a while only to see dad being crowned as the winner, but they took it quite sportingly; and all these time, dad was trying to make them understand what happened. Well the result was announced and dad won the 1st prize, the first ever prize he had won in his life for any sport, and all these years he kept bragging about it to us. Well, finally he revealed what actually happened, thanks to those family bonding sessions initiated by the State Government. 

P.S. No, my family doesn’t know I’ve a blog. So I needn’t worry much about getting kicked out of the house.