What Do You Think Life Is?

What do you think life is? This is a very common question and often we get big big definitions and meanings. But if you ask me, life is all about converting your weaknesses into your strengths and then matching the strengths with the available opportunities. Today, I’ll brief some of the life issues I had, which I call my weaknesses, but not anymore!

Sir toastmaster, my fellow toastmasters, ladies and gentlemen,

First of all, I hope most of you here cannot remember my name. So let me first introduce myself by my name. My name is Janaga. I’ll make it easy for you- it is spelt as J-A-N-A-G-A. If you ask me the meaning of it, I’m really sorry; I’ve no idea! This name was chosen by my mother, since the astrologer told to name me with the Tamil letter ‘Ja’ and my sister’s name ends with ‘ga’. She wanted my name to rhyme with my sister’s. So she simply played with my name! Nowhere was my name pronounced correctly! NOWHERE! So my name was my first weakness.

But finally, not long ago; very recently I awakened to the fact that my name is very unique and one in a thousand will have this name. And the deep research I made into this issue unravelled me the fact that people who are very close to me never call me with my full name. They all call me ‘Jana’, which I like! So I never bothered about my name thereafter. I am happy with it.

Moving on to the second weakness- Our home is a single gender world. Don’t be confused with rainbow thing! I’ll clear it to you. My family is consisting of females only. My mother who is a housewife, my elder sister who will soon be migrating to Canada, my granny who is paralysed since last year, and myself. My father who was working in Bank of Ceylon, demised 21 years ago. I’ve no male siblings by birth. So there is no males in our home. Due to that, from my childhood, I had this insecurity of associating with gents.

But today, my best friend is a guy. I have a good friend who is more like a brother from another mother. And except for them, most of my friends are from the opposite gender. Without any doubt, I know that they all are too caring and protective of me. Moreover, I’m pretty much comfortable in associating with boys who are very straight forward, rather than some girls who are too into acting!

Thirdly, the soul-stirring issue I had was my skin tone. It’s an unfortunate reality, but skin color effects the way you experience the world. From my childhood, I had some kind of complexity regarding my skin tone. “Dark skin is ugly” was my thought! May I share a secret with you? Please don’t laugh! Until I was 12 or 13, I Don’t drink chocolate flavoured milk or ice cream. You know why? Because I believed that drinking chocolate flavoured milk will make me even darker! I don’t know what made me think so. But I had this naive belief.

Today, I am matured enough to be proud of my skin tone. I know that the skin colour is not a big deal to face the world. Positive mindset, clear vision and the guts to face the uncertain tomorrow are all I need to shine as the epitome of beauty and glamour.

Now let me move into the biggest sorrow of my life. They say that no one in the world can love a girl more than her father. However, in my story, I was not such a blessed child to be with my father at least in a single phase of my life. As I’ve already said, my father, who is also my god father now was died when I was just two years of age. I always had the thought that unfortunate and cursed I am to not to get that paternal love and care in my life.