The stock markets are getting shaky! All because one man who has been continuously booed is causing supposedly invincible opponents to start looking worried!

Rahul Gandhi, for nearly a decade he has been joked about, lampooned, ridiculed and booed by the prime minister and the ruling party, but suddenly the whole nation is looking at him as a formidable opponent to  the once invincible Modi!

I believe he ignored the boos!

I remember an instance when I was called to be a judge at the Mumbai IIT Mood Indigo Festival for One Act plays. I asked whether I could bring my two daughters along, and they gave me permission to do so. Since I loved plays, I enjoyed each one of the plays put up by the different Mumbai colleges, despite the noisy whistles and other sounds boisterous crowds are bound to let off. Somewhere in the middle of the competition I realized there was an even bigger commotion and found one of the organizers at my ear, telling me that some of the participants who had not yet performed wanted to call the competition off, because there was too much booing and other sounds from the crowd.

I asked for the mike and went up to speak, and these might not be my exact words but I'm sure went something like this, “Dear Participants!” I said, “There is no such thing as a perfect audience! As you go through life, whenever you dare to do something different, or go up in front to do something better, there will always be people who will try to boo you down. Your job is not to tell them to shut up! Your job is to quieten those boos with your performance!  That is the challenge you will face, and today you can decide whether you have it within you to still those boos or run away!”

They performed. And performed well, and I do remember there were moments of pin drop silence as actors and actresses excelled themselves on stage! I would like to think that my two daughters learnt something from that experience.

That's exactly what young Rahul Gandhi has done. He's Ignored the boos, and ridicule, and continued picking on the formidable ruling party, even as they booed, and jeered, took away his house, filed cases against him, and heckled his every move. But today there's a grudging respect for him, throughout the world.

He ignored the boos.

That’s how you win this journey called life, that’s how you also win against people whom others till now thought were invincible..!

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