The idea of having an enemy itself is the biggest enemy in one’s personality. It is an absolutely wrong view to develop in the growing tender minds, especially in the minds of the teenagers. At this particular stage the mind is like the powdered Plaster of Paris and each learning acts like a drop of water. As the person grows the experience and learning that he collects through out gives the concrete shape to his ultimate personality. The developmental process as a whole starts with the procedures that are input in the child from its very childhood. It is concerned with the manner of describing the characteristics features of the various psychic changes that the child has gone through the development process of his mind. This is the reason why there should not be any negativity in a person’s personality. The whole personality gets structured right from the childhood days. Every new drop of learning and each experience gets added to mould his mind and his psychology. The moment a child comes to know the difference between good and bad, love and hate, care and ignorance, behaviour and misbehaviour; he is old enough to learn the way to have a positive personality in the future.

The ideas like ‘the enemy of my enemy is my friend’, are very harmful in growth of the child’s psychology. There is a great story in the ‘Panchatantra’. In this story a bird always use to lay eggs in a particular tree and there was a snake residing in a burrow just in the roots of that tree. The snake was big and very strong. He was much stronger than the bird. He always used to gobble up all the eggs laid by the bird. Every time the bird gets upset and gets very hurt. The bird can’t do anything as it was much fragile tan the snake. One day she thought of an idea. This time when she laid eggs on her nest she kept good watching of the snakes movements. When she discovered that the snake was out for a hunt she went to the nearby river and fetched some fishes. She then put those fishes in the form of a path from a mongoose burrow to the snake burrow. The mongoose got the smell of the fishes came out of his residence and followed one fish after another. While eating the fishes one after another he found the snake in its burrow. As snakes are enemies to mongoose, the mongoose killed the snake. The bird got the ultimate relief by the death of the snake. Next morning the bird flew out of the nest in search of food with a relaxed mind. But when she came back, to the level of her disappointment all her eggs were eaten up by someone. She soon saw the mongoose moving towards his burrow and sooner realized that none but mongoose had eaten all the eggs up. Actually the mongoose followed the same path that he got the other day through the fishes and out of greediness he reached the top of the tree and this time instead of the fishes he got the eggs. The gobbled up all the eggs just like the snake and went back to his burrow. The bird remained helpless. As it was small and fragile then the mongoose it could not do anything to it. The whole night she cried just like before and stood all helpless. The moral of this story is that the enemy of the enemy can never be a friend.

The character of being an enemy in it is villainy and so cannot be trusted under any situation. The idea is that the child should learn all those things that he sees around him as satisfying. The personality gets grown by the child himself after a certain age. The child needs to learn how to have patience and how to overcome each situation that is covered with jealousy, embarrassment and failure. This can be done by the kid himself by using little bit of his mental strength. He should always focus on making friends. Even he should mould himself in such a way that the enemy of his friend also turns up to be his and his friend’s friend. We have seen that a man always turns like an animal when he is angry. Just like the mongoose. It has also found that patience and forgiveness are the two things that separate a man from being an animal.

APARAJITA SARMA
KERELA