CHENNAI: My body would just completely freeze. Then my heart would start beating fast and I’d just shiver. I couldn’t breathe.
..that’s how bad the stress and anxiety was.
So much to do. So much competition. So much uncertainty.
What if I can’t do it? My mind had become my own enemy.” Shakti, a 22-year-old UPSC aspirant, would grapple with this every time she sat down to study. She was the “ideal” candidate, rising before the sun and slipping into slumber many hours after the moon took over the skies.
Heaps of books lay stacked on her table beside carefully arranged pens, pencils, rulers, and erasers. And while most her age slapped on their walls posters of some singer from a faraway land, Shakti chose to adorn them with sticky notes that hosted algebraic equations, to-do’s, and what-not — so, what was the problem? Sangam-era poet, saint, and philosopher Thiruvalluvar wrote this kural (couplet) 2,000 years ago in his Thirukkural, the book of sacred Tamil verses. Valluvar’s 1,330 kurals have welcomed myriad interpretations over the ages and so, it seems that Shakti is plagued with a common modern malady christened ‘self-doubt’.
“Each and every kural is relevant for all stages of life. In a way, Valluvar’s Thirukkural is the best life coach,” chuckles Niranjan Bharathi, Tamil poet, lyricist, and descendant of Subramania Bharathi, freedom fighter-cum-pioneer of modern Tamil poetry. We live in an era that is skies and oceans apart from Valluvar’s wo.