It’s the Journey That Counts

Friends, this is a short memoir based on my happy childhood. Thank you.

Title: It’s the Journey That Counts, Not the End Result
Subtitle: Sweet Delights of a Sweet Childhood

Once there a boy Anand about four years old living in Delhi. From a very young age, he was fond of observing things around him and then making them his own through his pencil sketches.

For example, there was a railway track near his house on which huge black steam locomotives used to roar day in and day out in both directions. From his balcony, Anand used to love watching these roaring giants, huffing and puffing along the track, with rapt attention. He used to stand fascinated, because compared to his small frame, these locomotives were giants indeed!

The moment these locomotives were out of sight, he used to rush indoors, and try to sketch the enchanting giant on his drawing notebook in all its interesting details. If he found himself unequal to the task, he used to ask his mother to do the sketch for him. That good lady, busy in cooking, used to get pretty annoyed with such sudden distractions. Nevertheless, she used to hurriedly produce some sort of pencil sketch. She knew very well unless she helped him, her son would keep asking until he got the sketch he wanted.

Psst, here is a secret… don’t tell anyone. And that is: the pencil sketch of the steam locomotive, made by Anand’s mother in between boiling rice for the lunch, used to have very little resemblance to the actual thing! And, if the truth be told, even his own sketches (sometimes drawn by him on the walls of the living room for want of paper!) used to be far from perfect.

Anand, nevertheless, used to be quite content. For him, it was the joy of sketching that mattered: their accuracy, proportion, colouring and other such details were mere trifles to the child. His reasoning was that a sketch need not resemble actual thing too much because he could always gaze at the actual thing for any detail lacking in the sketch.

When he reached five years age, Anand’s father got him admitted to a good school where he began learning how to colour his sketches with crayons and draw their borders with sketch pens. Now, he felt himself promoted to the higher realms of art. Because, so far, he had been making only pencil sketches of different objects. Now, he could make them come alive with colours.

This new ability made Anand very happy. For him, it was the joy of colouring that mattered. He could therefore make his sun redder than even the ripest tomato and his rivers bluer than even the Surf detergent powder and still be happy with the end result. For him, imagination was everything and the so-called reality counted for little.

In my opinion, he was right because when you do a thing out of happiness, the end result is secondary… it is the journey which counts.
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