I am from the village of Parra in Goa, hence we are called Parrikars. My village is famous for its watermelons. When I was a child, the farmers would organise a watermelon-eating contest at the end of the harvest season in May. All the kids would be invited to eat as many watermelons as they wanted. Years later, I went to IIT Mumbai to study engineering. I went back to my village after 6.5 years. I went to the market looking for watermelons. They were all gone. The ones that were there were so small. I went to see the farmer who hosted the watermelon-eating contest. His son had taken over. He would host the contest but there was a difference. When the older farmer gave us watermelons to eat he would ask us to spit out the seeds into a bowl. We were told not to bite into the seeds. He was collecting the seeds for his next crop. We were unpaid child labourers, actually. He kept his best watermelons for the contest and he got the best seeds which would yield even bigger watermelons the next year. His son, when he took over, realised that the larger watermelons would fetch more money in the market so he sold the larger ones and kept the smaller ones for the contest. The next year, the watermelons were smaller, the year later even small. In watermelons the generation is one year. In seven years, Parra’s best watermelons were finished. In humans, generations change after 25 years. It will take us 200 years to figure what we were doing wrong while educating our children.
(Excerpt from a speech by India’s Defence Minister Manohar Parrikar at an event hosted by the Federation of Gujarat Industries in Vadodara, India on 11 September, 2016. Transcription by Eisha Sarkar)
Date of speach missing and no one can confirm story true or not..
LikeLike
The date of the speech has now been added.
LikeLike
Beautiful speech. We are already seeing that our children know less than what we knew. We know less than what our parents knew. I think its serious time we sit back and change our education system. The best people should be teaching our kids. Otherwise we will keep hearing about Sir M.Vishveshwaraiah and Srinivas Ramanujam in history alone.
LikeLike
Please store the old seeds and after eating the fruits store all the seeds and while you are going out for a trip during summer scater the seeds on the road side on your way let our next generation eat them
LikeLike
The quasi-allegorical anecdote shows how he looked at issues creatively and in an intellectually fine way.
LikeLike