coma to comma - Be Optimistic

Dr R A Mashelkar narrates his experience and shows the way in which Mind set can be changed from negative one to positive :

I remember about eight or nine years ago, there was a big turmoil going on in Delhi University and the Teachers' Association had invited me for a keynote presentation at some symposia.  I remember some distinguished individual introduced me and after the introduction he said  "---- and as we  know,  we are all in coma and Dr. Mashelkar will address us and tell us what to do" 

 

Now, I had to think fast about my response in the time it took in walking up to the mike. I said, "Gentlemen, I have so far never addressed an assembly of people in coma. But maybe, the gentlemen didn't mean coma. He meant comma. And what is a comma? You write a sentence, you come to the middle of the sentence and you put a comma. That's a pause.  That's a time for you to reflect. You have not written the rest of the sentence. You write the rest of the sentence in a way that the next sentence follows, the paras follows, the pages follows, and the chapter gets completed. And may be it becomes a golden chapter, if you just interpret the coma and comma differently.

 

Do you know that the entire conference that was going to be a wash-out for the next two days, people being so negative, because of the negative environment they themselves had created, became a very positive conference!

 

So, I would say that positivism and looking at things positively, doesn't take much. There is no need to be dangerously optimistic but if you don't look at the positive aspects of life in particular way, things wouldn't happen that will take you upward and forward.