In the bustling town of Lalgudi, where the school bell still ruled the lives of boys more firmly than any government order, young Krishnan had begun to feel that his mind was a rather disorderly classroom. Thoughts pushed and shoved, desires raised their hands without permission, and old mistakes kept repeating themselves like a badly learnt multiplication table.
One evening, while sitting on the terrace with his uncle Venkatesh, Krishnan heard a story that stayed with him.
“There was a great freedom fighter named Subhas Chandra Bose,” Uncle Venkatesh said, closing his book. “Every night, no matter how tired he was, he practised a special kind of self-analysis.
First, he examined himself as he was at that very moment—his hidden desires, sudden impulses, secret aspirations.
Second, he looked at his whole life: the struggles he had faced, the errors he had made, and the lessons he could carry into the future. He said this analysis was like throwing a powerful searchlight into the dark corners of the mind. And the moment he discovered something ignoble or unworthy inside himself, he had already half-conquered it.”
Krishnan’s eyes lit up. The idea of a searchlight sounded exciting—almost like the detective stories he loved.
That very night, after the household had gone to sleep and the only sound was the distant bark of a dog, Krishnan sat cross-legged on his mat. He decided to try Bose’s method.
First, the present moment.
What was stirring inside him right now?
He discovered, to his mild horror, a strong desire to copy the arithmetic answers from the boy next to him the next day so that he could stay at the top of the class. Another impulse: to keep the two laddus his mother had given him for sharing with his younger sister, Meena. A third: a secret wish that his classmate Rajan would fail in the running race so that he, Krishnan, could win the prize.
Krishnan felt his ears grow warm. “Ignoble,” he whispered to himself, using the big word Uncle had used. And strangely, the moment he named these desires in the quiet of the night, they lost some of their power. The searchlight had found them. Half-conquered already.
Then came the second part—the whole life so far.
He remembered the time he had lied about finishing his homework and been caught. He remembered the quarrel with a friend over a broken slate and how he had refused to apologise for three whole days. He saw the pattern: whenever fear or pride appeared, trouble followed. From these past errors he drew a simple conclusion for the future: tomorrow he would try to speak the truth even if it cost him a few marks, and he would share the laddus without being told.
The next morning at school, when the arithmetic paper was distributed, the old impulse to glance sideways rose again. Krishnan remembered the searchlight. He looked straight ahead and worked out the sums himself—slowly, imperfectly, but honestly. At lunchtime he placed both laddus in Meena's tiffin box before she could ask. And when the running race was announced, he cheered for Rajan with surprising genuine feeling.
That evening he reported to Uncle Venkatesh, swinging his legs on the terrace wall.
“Uncle, I found quite a few dark corners last night. But the moment I saw them clearly, they became smaller. Netaji Bose guided me today.”
Uncle Venkatesh smiled. “That is the power of honest self-analysis, my boy. The searchlight does half the work. The rest is daily practice.”
In the soft dusk of Lalgudi, while other boys plotted cricket strategies under the street lamps and the temple bells rang in the distance, young Krishnan walked home feeling lighter. He still had a noisy mind, full of the usual schoolboy storms. But now he carried a small, steady searchlight of his own—one that, every night, helped him see himself a little more clearly and conquer the unworthy impulses one half at a time.