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| It could have been worse! | | |
A few years ago after landing at the New Delhi airport from an international trip I simply forgot to pick up my baggage from the luggage terminus. As I had come back after just a few days’ stay at Atlanta, the immigration official began cross-examining me with very odd questions. My immigration formalities at John F Kennedy airport were comparatively smooth. Preoccupied with the unexpected queries in my very own country, I walked out of the airport to my relatives who had come to receive me at the dead of night. I was carrying back home a number of small gifts for my friends and relatives.
Come morning, with great enthusiasm I rushed to open my baggage, which simply wasn’t there. I was dazed. But my friends and well-wishers sympathised with me and said, “Forget it. It could have been worse!”
I too realised, it could have been worse. Because while flying over the Atlantic Ocean our aircraft had to face a lot of turbulence due to bad weather. Just a day earlier in another aircraft many passengers had to return midway with broken bones just because of turbulence.
I looked below into the blue Atlantic and wondered when I had last taken my swimming lessons. The first one was more than four decades ago in “my own private swimming pool” for exactly nine months before I was born! The next one was again for a few months as a teenager in a water tank in my bathroom. Suppose, I thought, if we hit the ocean what should I do?
A drowning man would catch at a straw. What was a drowning woman supposed to be doing, with the Bill for women’s reservation already drowned!
For every bad thing that happens, it is a fact that worse could have happened! This phrase sticks to us like a chewed bubble-gum and we are tempted to say every time we wish to sympathise.
“Oh, it could have been worse!” This phrase by itself is a nice one, because it takes away a lot of shock we are otherwise in for. It helps us to count our remaining blessings, which are otherwise taken for granted. It is an instant balm on a burning heart.
A joke by Noel Horton, which I read in a magazine, goes thus: No matter how horrible the circumstance, Frank would remark. “It could have been worse!” Sick of his annoying habit and to cure him of it, his friends pulled a fast one on him. “Frank,” they said. “Did you hear of Tom? Last night he found his wife in bed with another man, shot them both, then turned the gun on himself.” “It could have been worse!” said Frank frankly, for if it had happened the night before, I’d be dead!”
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