Volume VI, Issue 2
Author: The Mother
Editor’s note: “Youths’ Noble Path: A volume of moral instruction designed for the use of children, parents, and teachers and mainly based on Eastern tradition, poetry, and history’’ is a book of short stories written by F. J. Gould (1911). The Mother translated and adapted some of the stories from Gould’s book into French, for the children of the Ashram school.
In 1946, these were published by Sri Aurobindo Ashram under the title Belles Histoires. English re-translations of these adaptations were brought out in 1951 under the title Tales of All Times. These stories are now included in Volume 2 of the Collected Works of the Mother.
We feature here a short tale on Cheerfulness. In addition to the English translation as told by the Mother, we present the Hindi translation in the form of an animated video. Video editing and voice-over are done by Biswajita Mohapatra.
Cheerfulness
One afternoon, in a large town in a rainy country, I saw seven or eight vehicles full of children. That morning, they had been taken into the country to play in the fields, but the bad weather had made them return home early in the rain.
And yet they were singing, laughing and waving merrily to the passers-by.
They had kept their cheerfulness in this gloomy weather. If one of them had felt sad, the songs of the others would have cheered him. And for the people hurrying by, who heard the children’s laughter, it seemed that the sky had brightened for a moment.
~ The Mother, CWM, Vol. 2, p. 189
