To continue my last post, I will write about an experience regarding an Engineering Drawing assignment.
There is this friend of mine, a really nice guy who has had a rough Engineering ride so far. He has 4 K.T.s and is working hard to clear them. Another fella, who has 2 is also a good friend. Now I felt really bad about them and since just feeling bad and doing nothing helps
absolutely no one, I was thinking of ways to help them. I am all right at E.D. and do like doing this subject's assignments. So I went to them and asked them whether it would help them if I made one of their drawing sheets. I told them to do the conceptual ones themselves as that would help them to develop the subject. But there were a couple of sheets that were just to be copied and I told them that I would do them for them if it would save their time.
They both said yes and I had some extra work. The sheets took me couple of hours each. I felt so full of myself. The time came when they had to get their sheets checked. Our teacher recognized my work(on his sheet). When we met later he asked me the reason of my 'social service'. I told him the reasons (pretty much the above paragraph). He heard them and told me that my friend had got 5 and 6 marks in each of the other sheets and 9 in mine. And I might have helped him in getting a little better term work but my help was hardly anything. Because he didn't know anything new. If I really wanted to help him, I should have taken out some time and taught him the concepts of the other chapters, so that he would be able to make sheets as good as mine, himself.
And I felt really bad. I knew that he was right. An old sentence came to my mind-
'You give a man a fish and he won't be hungry for a day, you teach him to fish and he will never be hungry for the rest of his life'. I had always known this. That's why I a so against giving alms to beggars. It is not the right way to help. Also it encourages beggary.
Its the same later as well I suppose. You don't help people by giving them money as effectively as you do by providing them employment. One point here though. The one who gets the easy help (cash, the fish or the drawing sheet) would probably be happier to get that easy help than doing things the hard, effective and long lasting way i.e. learning to do them. Funny short sight here again.
So I guess its important to choose the way of helping. I have promised my teacher that I will teach my friend one chapter of drawing, during our preparatory leave.
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