A Saucepan of Wisdom by Pratik Wadhwa

Few days ago, Diya ji penned down How Wisdom is Acquired. It left me scratching my head. Even after reading a number of times, I wasn’t able to decipher it. Though I remembered about the experiment Swami ji talked about in this video, I still felt that poetry can be an exception in this regard. After all, poets are known to write mind-bending things, at least for me.

Not a chance, my mind said. There’s no way you are going to understand a native English speaker’s poetry. Forget it. Move on.

I guess Diya wrote that post for a select few extra-terrestrials possessing sharp intellect that can decipher the poem. Never had someone threw such a bouncer – a bouncer that flew so high over my head that it nearly disappeared from my sight.

Not to be outdone by the bouncer, I somehow managed to get a bite of the cherry. And the bite was-

Wisdom is easily acquired,

When hiding under the bed with a saucepan on your head.

Well, well, well who doesn’t need wisdom in their life. And when it comes as easy as being under the bed and putting a saucepan on our head, it’s a no-brainer. 🧠

So with hope in my heart and saucepan on my head, I began the quest for acquiring ‘easy wisdom’.

I started off with a few essential items-

Bed-checked,

My head-checked,

Food and Water-checked,

Table fan-checked,

And last but not the least, the most important item (which I smuggled from kitchen), Saucepan-checked.

This experiment was to be diligently performed at night time-as that’s the only time I can get away from parents by performing weird experiments. I zeroed in 3 nights as the duration of the experiment.

So the first night arrived and I lay down under the bed. With a saucepan on my head, I binged on Netflix and International Friendlies (Football). The night passed by without any tinge of wisdom. It made me little sad.😏😒 Anyways, I moved on thinking that some wisdom will surely dawn forth in the next couple of nights.

Second night arrived and Nature, being generous, sent an amphibian to cheer me up and provide some company at my newly constructed temporary residence. The amphibian also came with high hopes of gaining life-changing wisdom easily.

It arrived.

It observed me binging on entertainment and food while balancing a saucepan on my head and contemplated from then onwards nearly for the rest of the experiment.

By the end of the third night, it had observed me gulping few litres of coke, tens of packets of Lays and duly listened to my loud burps. Safe to say it was unimpressed by this weird human and his antics.

Finally, it ran out of the patience and went away in sheer frustration in the final moments of the experiment.🐸😠

The experiment was gearing towards completion. I looked around and I looked inside, yet there was no trace of wisdom, not a trace in sight. Time was running out-only few minutes were left until the dawn.

Then something inexplicable happened- a divine light appeared in front of me out of thin air, as if impressed by the saucepan balancing skills on my head.

Here is the brief excerpt of our conversation.

Divine : What do you want, my child?

Me : O Divine, someone wrote that wisdom can be acquired by putting a saucepan on our head while sitting under the bed.

Divine : Hahaha, my child you are so innocent. Come, sit with me for a moment and I will provide you the wisdom of the universe.

At last, I felt elated beyond the world. The experiment has been a grand success. The ashram resident’s words weren’t conjured up from thin air after all. I may not have understood the poem, yet the little bite of the cherry was enough for me.

P.S. – The only true thing about this post are the frog pics. Well what about the rest?

I was looking to sharpen my imaginative skills and simultaneously thought to give some competition to Random Sentence Generator 🤷‍♂️🤷‍♂️, therefore this story took flight, until mom finally found the missing saucepan and whipped me back to reality. 🍳👊😆😂

Oh, so you are still waiting for the flash of wisdom that dawned upon me at the end of the experiment, well here it is-