Fate or coincidence? I do not know. But I would like to believe that this has a purpose…that this is planned. What am I talking about? Let me go back in time and tell you this story from the beginning.
It was the summer vacation and I was nine years old. I had already loved reading then and was super addicted to The Baby-Sitters’ Club series. Kristy, Claudia, Mary Anne, and Stacey were my role models. I admired them so much that I couldn’t wait to be thirteen years old already because in that series, four thirteen-year-old girls founded an organization that would help them raise money and help in their neighborhood at the same time by making baby-sitting a business. I wasn’t that interested in their baby-sitting adventures since it is not the trend here in the Philippines. I was more engrossed in their teenage lives.
One day, I chanced upon old books in the dresser drawer. I found romance novels, stories about war, etc. Nothing really caught my attention. But after much sifting, my attention was caught by a certain book. A book that I promised to never ever read as I cast it off as "boring as those thick history books".
Even though I got fairly high grades in history, I never really took to heart what I learned. Everything stayed in my short-term memory and was never recalled after the final exam. But that book had a certain something that caught the short attention span of a nine-year-old girl. The book was entitled, The Life of Mahatma Gandhi by Louis Fischer. It was sort of interesting, true. But I never pushed myself to read it. I was engrossed in reading the latest book in The Baby-Sitters’ Club series, Kristy and the Kidnapper by Ann M. Martin. The story was set in Washington D.C. and it was about a boy who joined the same debate competition that Kristy’s school joined. The boy was also a victim of a kidnapping attempt that only Kristy witnessed. At that time, I was so curious about what debating is and how to do it that Gandhi’s biography was pushed away from my mind and I never thought about it—until now.
One morning, I decided to have a look at my grandmother’s books, hoping I’d find something interesting to read. On the far left corner of the bookshelf, it was THE book. Without any hesitation, I took it and rifled through the yellowed pages, this time with great interest. But I was still reading Les Miserables and I’m determined to finish reading it before school starts. So what made me decide to read it? It was Sir Richard Attenborough’s review that persuaded me to finally read the book. He wrote, ‘The best biography of Gandhi…I was enthralled from the first page…it changed my life.’
The amazing realization? It was debate that made me decide not to read the book when I was nine years old but it was because of debate that I finally decided to read Mahatma Gandhi’s biography at sixteen. So, is it fate or coincidence? I’m letting you decide. =)
