“Punctuality is the first step to success.”
I can’t remember where and when I first heard this. It could be at the convent school I attended decades ago. It could be in college, where I was never on time for class. It could be during mealtimes at home, where I was always the last one to show up.
A ‘Failures Conclave’ — to which I was invited most cordially — therefore was the last thing I had expected to begin on time. It was, after all, a gathering of ‘failures’. But 82-year-old Avdhash Kaushal, the man behind this unique annual event at Dehradun’s Rural Litigation and Entitlement Kendra (RLEK), an NGO, doesn’t indulge latecomers — be it a minister or a celebrity.
At exactly two seconds to 11 am on February 23, the former teacher of public administration and Padma Shri recipient walked to the podium in RLEK’s conference hall and inaugurated the third edition of the conclave. Addressing school and college students from Punjab, Uttarakhand and Bhutan, Kaushal explained that the idea behind the event was to help youngsters understand and deal with failure, mostly in academics, as well as breaking the taboo around talking about it. In fact, every speaker on the six-member panel had failed exams at least twice.
When he had failed his exams in school — more than once, actually — Kaushal combed his neighbourhood in Meerut for other students who had fared badly. “I found quite a few. And together we decided to mark the occasion by distributing namkeen (savouries), because the ones who had passed were distributing sweets,” he said, adding that failure should also be celebrated. “Our students are not taught to handle failure. That’s why they often take drastic steps,” said Kaushal, hinting at the number of suicides by students in India.
Sitting at arm’s length from the speaker, Hindi author and poet Leeladhar Jagudi (78) had only two words to describe his years in school: “Very bad”. The Sahitya Akademi Award winner was not even 10 when he fled his village in Tehri Garhwal district. With no money or friends to turn to for support, Jagudi went through a series of odd jobs to fend for himself: From being a farmhand to a night watchman.
Through those years of uncertainty, Jagudi had but one faithful companion — Bollywood icon Dev Anand. “His songs, his style, his attitude... I liked everything about the man. I always hummed his songs for inspiration,” said the Padma Shri awardee.
The other thing that appealed to Jagudi was the characters Anand played. “In many of his films, Dev Anand played the ordinary guy, someone who is not an overachiever. And yet he was the hero,” he said. Even after he found ‘real’ friends in his later years, Jagudi remained loyal to the actor who brought him hope in some of the darkest years of his life.
In his speech at the Failures Conclave, Jagudi underscored the importance of friends in a student’s life: “Bad company ruins you. Good company makes your life.”
Whenever Mahesh Chand Kaushal, former principal of Sardar Patel Inter College in Meerut, struggled with English in his school days, he found solace in the lyrics of a Hindi film song.
“My failure in securing pass marks in the subject had become a topic of discussion in the family. It made my spirits droop,” said the 78-year-old speaker. “One day, in order to cheer myself up, I decided to go to the theatre. I bought tickets to a film called Toofan aur Deeya ,” he added.
He doesn’t remember anything about the 1956 film barring a Manna Dey song: Nirbal se ladaai balwan ki/ Yeh kahani hai diye ki aur toofan ki (’Tis the fight of the strong against the weak, ’tis the story of the lamp and the storm). “I can’t say why it appealed to me so much, but I went home with the resolution that I must conquer my fear of English,” he said. He succeeded in his mission and, in his years as a teacher, he used the story of his own failure to inspire students facing difficulties in class or caught cheating during exams.
For Vaidya Balendu Prakash (60), an ayurvedic doctor from Dehradun, the word ‘failure’ was almost a part of his identity. Also a Padma Shri, the former physician to the president of India failed in various subjects in school. “My troubles continued in college. I was suspended not once but thrice. It seemed there was no way ahead for me,” he said in his speech. But Prakash kept at it, waiting for his “achhe din”.
While he has no magic formula for reversing fortunes in exam results, the doctor believes that behind every instance of failure lies an inadequacy of a person’s ecosystem — family, teachers, education system, for example.
In the age of 95 per cent cut-off marks for college admission, a conclave on handling failure sure feels like an anachronism. But the takeaways from it are likely to be more lasting than what can be tabulated in grades and percentiles.