MAVERICK On his way to school, Maverick observed the beautiful flowers on the way side. Yesterday’s lessons about colours came in handy to identify all the wonderful hues. “Do you know your colour?” he posed a question to the blue flower which nodded as the breeze passed through it. “I don’t think so” chuckled Maverick, “Your neighbour is white, next one is red and the other violet” saying this he
grazed his eye as far as he could see, taking in as much as he could of the beautiful morning on this glorious day. As the school bell rang, his romantic morning was cut short, and rushed to reach in time. That day in school he learnt about measurements of weight, volume and distance. The things teacher showed to the children were all new and exciting, tape measure, weight balance and measuring jars. “Wow” maverick was in awe thinking about all the things he could do with these measures.
What was he thinking? He could measure the distance from his home to his school, the length of the hair on his friends head, the length of their finger nails, their weight with and without a LadyBug on their shoulder, the weight of all the fallen leaves in the garden, how many stars you could fill in a cup, and all other useful stuff needed for a kid to survive school. Did Maverick do all these? Yes, and the ones you could not even dream to think of, and what was that?
After waking up from what was a very cold night, Maverick with his bladder full, almost to the point of bursting, went to relieve himself. That day’s output was much more than previous days, how much more? He began to measure from that day on.
He was not only interested in his measure, but others too. Every one of his friends was given a jar for this purpose, and some of them participated in this fun activity of measuring their morning output. Is this fun? Well, to be honest not all liked it, they were disgusted, but seeing others eagerly participating, they were slowly sucked into it one by one. And pretty soon the whole motley lot of Maverick's friends were happily measuring. "Every one is doing it" and with this one sentence, disgust was wiped clean from their minds. “Did I better my record?” asked one of his friends, showing his measure. “Nope, sorry. Better luck next time.” replied Maverick. “Hey, who has the better record?” enquired another.
Maverick had not thought about this, “Yes, who?” he wondered.
“Let me find out” and began plotting on a graph all the data he had collected till then, checked and re-checked it and finally announced the winner. Some rejoiced as the news spread but some of them were sour hearing it, as they were not the winner. “I will show them, what I can do” was their resolve. What started as a fun activity soon turned ugly, those who went to the loo smiling, came out crying, as their morning measure did not measure-up to the standard. They
were in tears , because all their efforts went in vain. What kind of efforts? Here is a peek into some of their motivational posters pasted on their bedroom walls,
Drink gallons of fluid before bed. You can do it. Don’t 'go’ for days. Stay focused. You are almost there; Victory is in sight.
Imagine your name in the records. Go for it.
This funanity (fun+insanity) progressed to the next level, when some of them made up their measure with water, to get their name in the record books.
This seemed right for those who did wrong and wrong for those who did it right. So, what did the 'Rights' do instead of cheating? Did they stop measuring? No. They started to measure what they are good at and pretty soon others followed. The whole colony was a cacophony of measures; greatest in this, greatest in those, greatest in this but not those, greatest in those but not this. Maverick was very busy measuring all their measures, and greatly enjoyed what he was doing.
Now you would be profoundly mistaken to think, that each one in the colony was happy in their own world with their respective measures.
Alas! they progressed to the next level, as they all wondered, “Which is the absolute measure among all our measures?” This led to another round of cacophony, “We live up to the greatest measure”, which was rebutted by,“We have the gold standard”.
Maverick who had a unique position in the colony, contemplated, “You are what you measure”. "But, why?" he posed to himself and before long he found the reason,
“You reward what you measure and you get what you reward and as a result you become what you measure.” We shall stop with this, since you get the message and time to take a short recess. Go relieve yourself and please don’t think about this silly story and all the measures you are measuring yourself up to. May peace be with you in the bathroom and every where.