Monday, October 19, 2009

The Beetles

No no no... Don't confuse the post to be something with the famous music band. This is a short story by a famous writer about ego. I am not sure if it was James Thurber or Bertrand Russel. We will refer to the writer as 'the writer' itself. The writer was in his high school or college days where the class teacher was lecturing about "Ego". The teacher was giving a lengthy discourse about ego that most of the students either did not understand what the teacher told about ego or they grew tired. Suddenly our writer jumped to the front and told the teacher that he could explain the same thing a bit differently using some analogy so that even a layman understands it. The teacher gave a go ahead and the writer started to explain with a short story that went like this.

"There was once a big elephant that wandered in the forest. One day it came across a bridge that was formed by a fallen tree between the edges of a small stream that went below. The elephant wanted to cross the stream by walking over the tree. When the elephant put its foot on the tree, a beetle sat on its head at the same time the elephant put its leg on the tree bridge. And the tree bridge collapsed without being able to bear the weight of the elephant. Hence both the elephant and the beetle fell below. Now the beetle got up and thought, this bridge is too weak to bear even my weight. The attitude of the beetle is called 'ego'"

This story brought our writer a loud applause from the entire class including the teacher.

Now coming to the point, as in this story there are many beetles who are around in an organization who tend to think that things happened only because they got involved. But, in reality, a lot others would have put in their blood and sweat to make things happen. These beetles don't appear until things are ripe to proclaim their contribution. The beetles happen to be all over the hierarchy (from Software Engineers to Projects managers and above). The more the beetles higher in the hierarchy, the more the scapegoats. The more the beetles in the lower hierarchy, the more the pests. See we have come across a lot of animals, I believe that this can expand into another Discovery channel. :)

So long, until the next post

2 comments:

ThndrKiss said...

Super !!! . . very nice theme . . this will soon become popular and bring in more ppl like rprabhu blog. . All the best

R. Prabhu said...

Thanks for the wishes Ayyappa. Congratulations on posting the first comment in this blog :)