MONDAY MUSINGS SEASON 2 - EPISODE 317
9th June 2025
#Resilience
Fight for the sake of duty, treating alike happiness and distress, loss and gain, victory and defeat. Fulfilling your responsibility in this way, you will never incur sin. (Bhagavad Gita 2.38)
Celebrate every success for the inspiration it gives and celebrate every failure for the learnings it brings - Jaganathan T
Failure is often seen as a negative outcome—a sign of weakness, incompetence, or lack of worth. But in the divine narrative of life, failure is not a full stop. It is a comma—a pause, a redirection, a profound opportunity to grow.
#FailedLaunchesToFamedLaunches
India’s space program is recognized as a great global success. This recognition has not come without encountering failures. Do you know that most of the launch vehicles of ISRO have failed in their first mission only to recover and rebuild to global acclaim.
The first experimental flight of SLV-3, in August 1979, was a partial success before the first successful launch of SLV-3 in the very next year. Maiden flight of next generation launch vehicle, PSLV-D1 on Sept 20, 1993 failed miserably, Nevertheless PSLV proved as the most successful and dependable launch vehicle in the world. The second failure of PSLV was only on Aug 31, 2017, when PSLV-C39 failed to deploy the IRNSS-1H satellite due to a heat shield separation issue. The first development flight of GSLV (Mk I configuration), launched on 18 April 2001 was a failure as the payload failed to reach the intended orbit parameters.
If ISRO would have given up on these failures, India would not have conquered space.
#BhagavadGita teaches us how to understand failure not as a defeat, but as divine design. What appears to be loss may be part of a much larger plan to help us deepen, realign, and ultimately, transform.
#DualitiesOfLife
Here is one more sloka from Bhagavad Gita on how to handle success and failure.
यदृच्छालाभसन्तुष्टो द्वन्द्वातीतो विमत्सर: | सम: सिद्धावसिद्धौ च कृत्वापि न निबध्यते || Bhagavad Gita 4.22||
Content with whatever gain comes of its own accord, and free from envy, they are beyond the dualities of life. Being equipoised in success and failure, they are not bound by their actions, even while performing all kinds of activities.
It is a fact beyond any argument that God created this world full of dualities, like day and night, sweet and sour, hot and cold, rain and drought, etc. The same rose bush has a beautiful flower and also a painful thorn. Life too brings its share of dualities—happiness and distress, fame and failure. God proved this principle in his avatar as Lord Ram. Lord Ram was exiled to the forest just when he was expecting to be crowned as the king of Ayodhya. He did not cry, was not crestfallen. He took it as his duty, whether ruling the kingdom or exile in forest. That was his lesson to us on handling difficult situations.
Nobody can hope to neutralize the dualities to have only positive experiences. Then how can we successfully deal with the negative outcomes that come our way in life? The solution is to take these dualities in stride, by learning to rise above them in equipoise in all the situations. This happens when we develop detachment to the fruits of our actions, concerning ourselves merely with doing our duty in life without yearning for the results.
The Bamboo and the Fern
The fern grows quickly and visibly. The species of bamboo used for paper called Neosinocalamus Affinis grows roughly 60-90 centimetres a year until it reaches maturity, around 3-5 years later. But during this time, it is developing a vast root system. When it finally grows, it shoots up 100 feet in six months.
What does this teach us? That success need not be visible always and efforts may not yield immediate results, but that doesn’t mean it’s wasted. It’s often deepening our roots for future resilience. In the same way, our failures should be fertilizing the soul, preparing us to rise in unexpected ways.
Surrender is Strength, Not Giving Up
When things don’t go our way, it's easy to spiral into frustration or blame. But spiritual surrender brings us calm amid chaos. Shree Krishna teaches Arjun to rise above the emotional pull of failure and act with inner steadiness. Surrender helps us accept failures, without becoming paralyzed by it.
When you let go of the need to control the outcome, you unlock the power to transform the present.
Resilience
Resilience is a related term though different from ‘coping with failures. Resilience refers to the ability to successfully adapt to stressors, maintaining psychological well-being in the face of adversity. It's the ability to “bounce back” from difficult experiences.
Resilience is not a trait that people possess or that comes through genetics. Psychological research demonstrates that the resources and skills associated with resilience can be cultivated and practiced.
Resilient Walt Disney
Let us see some interesting stories of resilient and successful individuals. Walt Disney was the walking, talking embodiment of perseverance in the face of failure. His early setbacks, including bankruptcy and losing the rights for a beloved character, could have deterred him from pursuing his dreams. However, he surprised everyone with his unwavering perseverance and resilience.
We shall see the story of resilience in our next episode of Monday Musings.
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POSITIVE NEWS PAGE
Adapted from thenewindianexpress.com
Before covering the story of Walt Disney, let me narrate a current affairs story of perseverance, resilience and brilliance, story of hope from a village in Tamil Nadu.
In a modest home in Attur, Salem, nestled under a rusted corrugated sheet roof, Santhi’s day begins before the daybreak, at 4 am. The 55-year-old walks to the shed, pats her two milch cows gently, and the day has been just the same for the past 33 years.
“My only dream was to see my daughter study and make it big in life.” That dream has now taken her daughter, R Rajapriya, across the world to Brazil and soon to Finland. At 35, Rajapriya is now a post-doctoral researcher in cement chemistry, supported by the National Council for Scientific and Technological Development (CNPq) in Brazil. Another leap came when she was recently awarded the prestigious Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions (MSCA) Fellowship 2024 with a perfect evaluation score of 100%. The fellowship, valued at Rs 2.8 crore, will see her researching sustainable construction technologies at the University of Oulu in Finland, with a six-month stint at C2CA Technology in Netherlands.
Rajapriya was just a toddler when her father, a farmer, died of jaundice. Left with no income and a child to raise, Santhi started selling milk to local cooperative societies. Santhi enrolled Rajapriya at Attur Government Girls’ Higher Secondary School. Her brilliance soon spoke for her. By Class 8, a private school offered her free admission, impressed by her exam scores.
After scoring 1,096 out of 1,200 in Class 12, she chose civil engineering on the advice of a relative’s friend during the Anna University counselling session.
To cover her college and hostel expenses, the family had to take out an educational loan. After completing her BE, she took up teaching briefly before pursuing her ME in Construction Engineering and Management. Upon completing ME, she resumed teaching, this time at a private engineering college in Chennai, where she worked for two years.
While attending conferences and workshops, she was inspired to pursue a PhD. She eventually cracked the entrance for a PhD at Anna University, supported by the Anna Centenary Research Fellowship awarded only to the top 50 applicants.
After her doctorate, she joined CSIR–Structural Engineering Research Centre (SERC) in Chennai as a senior project associate. Rajapriya’s journey gradually shifted from academics to hands-on research, driven by a growing passion to engage more actively with real-world challenges in her field.
Her big break came in January 2025 when she secured a post-doc position in Brazil under the guidance of Professor Ana Paula kirchheim at Federal university of Rio Grande do Sul. Barely had she settled in when the news arrived: she had been selected for the Marie Curie Fellowship, one of the most prestigious research grants in Europe. Shortly after, she was awarded the prestigious MSCA Fellowship 2024 in Finland.
Her upcoming research focuses on recycling construction and demolition waste, aiming to make building materials more sustainable. She will work under the guidance of senior scientist Priyadarshini Perumal and CEO Thomas Petithugueni, contributing to technologies that may soon transform how the world builds.
Back home, Santhi, who has studied only till middle school, shared, “I don’t really understand what my daughter is doing, not even when she tries to explain. But I know it’s something big. I miss her terribly. However, I sleep peacefully knowing she’s doing what she loves the most.”
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Conceived, compiled and posted as a weekly motivational newsletter #MondayMusings by Jaganathan T (www.authorjaganathan.com) every Monday consistently for the last 317 mondays without missing a single monday. Subscribe Monday Musings to read positive information every monday.
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PROMOTIONS
