The desire to try, part 2

Yesterday I have written about the importance of encouraging our children in whatever attempts they made to learn or experience things; that we should never undermine the strong inborn desire to imitate, to practice and to reach for the highest achievements possible.

Today, I wish to continue on how anybody, not just any child, can perform when given the chance to do so.

Do you know that I can cook. I was able to cook through watching others perform. When I was young I had to cook when my parents were busy earning a living. It was cook or go hungry. I took the more positive move. And during the process, I learned.

I liked to cook experimentally fairly often. By experimentally, I meant that I often use ingredients my mother claimed nobody uses. She would insist that people never cook things this way or that way. Fortunitely, she never had the time to obstruct my desire to try out things.

At a time when people despise bean sprouts as they were free, given free whenever we buy noodles, I enjoyed frying them with some onions, garlic and eggs. I have observed how the hawkers would heat the wok with a little oil in it. Then, they would put in the onions and the garlic,stir-fry them a little, add some chillies perhaps and then the noodles. Instead of noodles I used the beansprouts. Through experience, I discovered that beansprouts which are not too well-fried are crispy and delicious, if a little light soya sauce is added just before we scoop it up onto a plate.

At that time, people used to say I was stupid, especially when I asked for more sprouts than noodles. Well, young though I was then, I had read about nutrients for our body and knew that although it was free, it had more nutrients than the noodles made from refined flour which contained mostly carbohydrates. Do you see how important knowledge was and still is to me?

Whenever I cooked, and I needed something to sweeten a dish, I used just about anything that could make the dish sweet. Sometimes, it's just sugsr. At times when ice-cream soda, coca cola, honey, sugarcane drinks, molasses or brown sugar are available, I used them and the taste differs a little each time, giving a variety of sweetness to the dish.

The same thing goes for spices. Chillies is not the only thing hot. We can use pepper and chilli sauce. Chilli sauce is a little different from pounded chillies.

Besides chillies, there are so many other spices to try out, mixing them for soup to get some exotic taste.

Of course, every now and then, the resulting taste may not be as good as we would like it to be. But then, without trying it out, how are we ever to know.

Talking of that, if my memory does not fail me, a famous chicken recipe was the result of the founder's accidental inclusion of certain spices.

We are lucky that humans have been imbued with a curious mind and a strong desire to try out their ideas. Imagine what would have happened if inventors who dared to try out their ideas, curious to know if their ideas would work were non-existent. There would have been no bicycle, no car, no bus, no plane, no helicopter, no ship, no radio, no television, no computer and many, many other things which have made our lives so good.

So, never suppress or obstruct in any way the human spirit for its strong urge to imagine the so called impossible, the desire to experiment or development of ideas no matter how far-fetched such thoughts may appear.

It is easy for minds which are unable to concieve something to express disdain for what appears to be unfathomable ideas. Our hope is that those who are able to concieve them would transform such thoughts into concrete inventions.

There was a time when the idea that we could enjoy movies in a box coming in through the air whenever we let electricity come into it would have been preposterous. In those days, anyone talking of electric current flowing through a wire at the flick of a switch could be considered out of his mind.

Today, it is so common place that we hardly think of the fantastic minds that had made it possible. Thank God for their attempts to transform their ideas into inventions.
And thanks to their parents or someone who could have influenced or inspired them must have done a fantastic job encouraging them.