"Eli thinda kathe" - "Story of the mouse"

Besides being a very distinguished Kannada scholar, my maternal grandfather was a great raconteur. Some of his talents have rubbed off on my mother and every once in a while she comes up with an inspired re-telling of grandpa's stories. Sample this -

"Eli thinda kathe" - "Story of the mouse".

When my grandad was a school kid, he had a lesson titled, "Story of the mouse", in his Kannada text book. It was a difficult lesson, and so he never liked it. To avoid studying this lesson, he tore it out of his text book and simply pretended that the lesson did not exist. Right through the academic year, he lived with this make believe notion that the lesson had disappeared from the syllabus. For all purposes, practical and otherwise, "Eli thinda kathe" ceased to exist.

Sadly for grandpa, when the the final exam came, it had many questions from this lesson. Not surprisingly, he didn't do to well. In life too, we tend to do this quite often. We ignore things that we don't like and pretend that they don't exist, in a hope that they would simply go away. Doesn't work. As my Ajja would say - "eli thinda kathe hange" - "like the Story of the mouse" :)