Sunday, January 23, 2011

Correction

Yesterday a colleague of mine and I were discussing deep philosophy about life. I was trying to remember some joke to relax him. He was referring to some mistakes he thought he had done in past, which is still affecting his life.

Cut to a story I remembered.

There was a ship sailing. It was destined to reach Chennai in India. The captain was a very wise and old man. A freshman sailor was also in the crew, who was given responsibility of keeping the close eye on ship's direction at night, when most of the crew would retire to sleep. He was told to use the compass to do his job, and any change was to be reported to captain immediately.

Few weeks later, the ship reached near the land. Captain observed that it wasnt Chennai exactly. They found later it wasnt India at all. They had reached Sri Lanka. Immediately captain ordered entire crew on the deck. And started to find the cause of such enormous mistake. When he finished most of the crew with questioning, he suddenly remembered the fresh sailor for the night duty. He went to him and asked, "Was there any change in the needle of the compass?"
The sailor said, "No". Captain asked again, "Wasnt there even a small change in the needle direction?"

"Oh Yes", sailor remembered, "But it was just a fraction. It was not even changed to next smallest degree mark in the compass."

"Son, that small fraction has cost us more than 500 miles. Had you reported me that fraction of change in direction we would have corrected it the next day. Even it was small at the time in the direction of our destination, in the due time now you see, has put us far far away from our destination."

Back to our discussion, isnt it that we ignore small change which may distract us from our original destination? Since we ignore, we dont plan to correct it at proper time. And by the time we realize we might have reached Sri Lankan shores.

I love short stories, it takes away pain of consoling friends !

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6 comments:

  1. Nice Story Navneet.....

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  2. And that's our software firms says periodic/milestone reviews are very important.
    It applies to our lives as well.

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  3. Story acchi hai.. kaha se dhapi..??

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  4. Good one. Typical week should be action-action-reflection rather than action-action-action ...

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