To Hell With Failure!

While in school, I had this habit of getting upset when I did not score the highest marks or the rank that I aimed at. For days on end, I would be brooding over my marks and rank and my mother used to say, “you should learn to face failures. You will not get all that you wish for. You have a long way to go. There is always a next time.”

When I read about young children committing suicides for failing in exams and youth committing suicide for their failure in love affairs, I feel very sad for the parents. How can the children forget their parents who love them so much and sacrifice so much for their welfare at that moment? Life has so many challenges and there are so many purposes for which we could use our lives, instead of ending our lives abruptly. We have to strengthen our children mentally to face failures. Only to inspire young minds, I am writing this story.

Muktha Gubbi was a young lawyer, teaching in a law college. She was full of life and hope and was going strong with a person of her choice. She had a dream of marriage, children, career and a cozy home. But fate had bigger plans for her. On a fateful day in the late nineties, she met with a freak accident and lost three toes of one of her feet. Her dreams crashed. As the wound healed and she started trying to walk, she realised she could not walk easily. She had severe pain and could not balance her wait on half a foot. Just then her lover started gradually distancing from her and one day expressed his inability to marry her. Muktha was totally shaken and she cried for days together. She decided there was no point in living anymore and was thinking of the ways in which she could end her life.  

One of her friends suggested her to go to the Rehabilitation Centre for the Disabled, for assistance. She went there and waited sadly, to meet the Doctor. Just then, she saw a young mother struggling to pacify her toddler daughter, who was wailing. She asked her, “Why did you come here? What’s wrong?” 

“Amma, what to say of my fate? I belong to a very poor family. This is my daughter. She is born blind and my in-laws are very upset. We do not know how to bring up this child. We don’t have the resources to treat her or educate her.” 

Muktha, who was just then toying with the idea of ending her life, suddenly had a flash. ‘Why should I die for a person who is so selfish and heartless and waste my life. There are so many who are in worse conditions, who need the support of society. I shall do something for such poor people’.

It took two full years for Muktha to get back on her feet and walk without support. By then, she had a blueprint in her mind. She would start a school for blind children. She had no land, no funds, nobody to support her idea firmly. She just started with one child in her small house. Gradually, more and more people started approaching her and she needed a bigger space. She approached the Karnataka Housing Board, Yelahanka for a piece of land and luckily they did allot her a piece of land surrounded by multi-storeyed residential apa

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rtments.  

Localites started recognising her good work and intentions and started supporting her financially. She approached a nationalised Bank for a loan and they too agreed to fund her. Thus she started the building with confidence, though she had just 40 or 50% of the project cost funded. She trusted in Lord Raghavendra and knew that a good deed will definitely be blessed by him. She faced a lot of opposition from the surrounding residents, who were suspicious of her project. Every now and then they would lodge complaints against her and she had to run to the police station and court. She fought tooth and nail with the system and as her ambitious project started taking shape, more and more good samaritans started supporting her. She received assistance from unexpected quarters. ‘ASHA’ of the US donated a big chunk of the project and the ‘Mathru School for the Blind’ got its own building, a very tastefully designed building. In no time, Muktha, who wants to always give the best to the students, furnished and decorated the building and created a beautiful garden around it. She runs a residential school for the blind there. Hundreds of visually challenged children have passed out of this school in the last 15 years with flying colours. And mind you, children here are filled with confidence and positive energy.  

Muktha then started expanding her project, as she felt there were so many children suffering from other types of disabilities who too needed such institutions. She was allotted an acre of land near a quarry in Yelahanka and she built a very aesthetic centre for hearing impaired children and also for children with multiple disabilities. Today, Mathru is like a huge banyan tree catering to nearly 150 children with different kinds of disabilities, where they get basic education, life skills, nutritious food and comfortable lodging facilities, all for free or very meagre fee. As you enter any of her centres, you will be welcome by happy, healthy and enthusiastic children. Mathru exposes them to all kinds of arts like music, dance, drama and also sports and literary activities. Right now, Muktha is already constructing a third building to house a day care centre for the autistic children and children with multi-sensory disabilities, which she is running since this academic year.  

Though I have covered all her activities in just a few words, I need not say what a struggle she might have gone through to reach this level, all alone, though supported financially and morally by her family members, other trustees and hundreds of her friends. She met with two other accidents and injured her already injured foot again and is going through a lot of pain and stress. But nothing stops her from ensuring that her children get the best.

She adopted little Raghavendra and is grooming him with the hope of getting an able hand to assist her in future. This smart kid is happy to spend all his free time in the centre.

Thus Muktha is the most inspiring friend that I have, who has taken failures in life head-on and proved to the world that she had a greater purpose in life than just getting married and leading a mundane ordinary family life. God bless this gritty woman and help her realise all her dreams, which are totally selfless!