SLOW AND STEADY WINS THE RACE

You must be quite familiar with the above-cited proverb. This has been a topic of a story in the Panchatantra and has been quite popular since then. The story is centered on a race between a tortoise and a rabbit. As the story progresses, the rabbit who has taken a much more significant lead decides to take a nap as he thinks that the tortoise with his slow speed won’t be able to make up the distance. But this decision of his turns out to be an entirely devastating one since he oversleeps and this enables the tortoise, who was continually moving, though at a slow speed to reach the finish line and win the race.

But don’t you think that the idea pitched in the story is a bit far-fetched in this age of science? What I mean is that this approach apparently considers that the rabbit never learns from his mistakes nor do the nearby animals watching the race. In Panchatantra and other Indian folktales, where animals are treated as intelligent beings who can communicate with each other by talking, this idea would be considered nothing more than a ruse.

Now suppose we look at this problem from a different point of view and try bringing on a new second part of the story. Let’s say that watching his friend lose the race; a fellow rabbit understood what went wrong. To restore the lost pride of the rabbit community, he decided to challenge the winner tortoise. Now, the tortoise having won the previous encounter was a bit over-confident racing with another rabbit. He was entirely sure that like the last one, this rabbit too would rest while he would easily cross the finish line.

But that’s not how the story progressed. Since the rabbit already knew the rookie mistake his friend had done, he dashed towards the finish line as soon as the race started dropping the idea of resting on the way. The tortoise started with his usual speed and while slowly moving towards the finish line, kept looking for a sleeping rabbit. But he couldn’t find him anywhere and finally when he reached the finish line, he found his fellow competitor had already completed the race and was resting.

The new moral? Don’t be slow or else you would be left behind. Also, overconfidence leads to an eventual failure. And the best one, you should learn from your mistakes.

But was that what the initial story was all about? Was it all about speed and overconfidence? This is a question to ponder over. Let us revisit the moral of our original story, “Slow and steady wins the race.” So what was it all about?

This story was designed to imbibe the idea that even if a development is slow, it must not be left unattended to. That is, in other words, few things develop over time, and we should have regard for those things just like a beautiful butterfly takes time for its transformation from a caterpillar. Also adding to the above point is that being fast and reckless might do more harm than good.

That has always been the actual moral of the story. Though without better interpretation, this might be a subject of criticism. So in the modern day world, though we shouldn’t be slow because we have to compete in the race for success and survival, we shouldn’t be reckless in our actions as this brings unknown predicaments to our lives. We should be fast and agile and complete our tasks with perfection, leaving no scope for ridicule.