Table of Contents
Autobiography of Manoranjan Bajpayee
“You ain’t gonna leave the jail for another ten years,” heard the Dalit boy from the refugee colony, and he started crying.
Father used to travel with locals without a ticket and bring some money back home if he had work. Most days, there wouldn’t be one.
The six-year-old young sister died out of starvation. Then the father got bedridden. Mother had to fold herself in a mosquito net given by the government. She couldn’t come outside the “home” at day times. And at an age when other children were in school, he was working, in hotels, on the platform, and walking in the dark streets of Kolkata.
The big man, his inmate, asked: “what are you going to do for ten years?”, “Want to study?”
He started learning letters from the big man. He fell in love with his studies. He was reading book after book.
He became a Rickshaw puller coming out of jail. But most money would go into books. He would see the world through them. One day, a lady passenger got surprised to see the books in his Rickshaw. It was the famous author Mahasweta Devi. She asked, “Why don’t you write?”
Soon, Manoranjan Byapari, the Jail graduate, started writing, went on to write “Interrogating My Chandal Life,” and became a Bengali literature star.
When life throws stones at you, make a mansion out of them. FIGHT.
Life Lessons from Manoranjan Bajpayee’s Life
- Life is beautiful, irrespective of the form and the struggles. Cherish life. Even in the darkest days and prisons, life has a lot of learning and wealth stored for you. Search for the wealth life has for you in the dark rather than getting anxious about the dark.
- Everyone thinks that if they get some XYZ, their life will be sorted, and they will be happy. The reality is that happiness is a choice. A happy one will be happy irrespective of what life throws at it.
- Poverty, helplessness, miserable neighborhood, difficult childhood, nothing can be a good enough excuse not to grow every day.
- Success follows those who constantly pursue knowledge.
- When life is hard, life will always send you an angel, a massager of God, to help you. Hard times are, therefore, the best time to become intimate with God.
- Focus on creating the assets and wealth that will remain with your family and human race well past you have left the world. One generation is not enough to uplift the family from the darkness of ignorance and ill-knowledge.
- Growth always follows deep knowledge, learning, and studies. Degree and educations are not substitutions for deep knowledge.
- Everyone has a talent. No one on the planet is born without a talent that is not better than anyone else. The only difference between success and failure is that successful people understand what they are good at and focus their entire life on sharpening those skills.
- Success and failure are judged by history. Become relevant for history. If you constantly worry about what you are getting now, then you will never be able to put enough effort into being relevant to history. One who is not relevant to history is hardly ever cared for by society. Those sleeping in the bed of roses and eating with golden spoons are never cared for by history.
- Pain is a beautiful gift of life. Do not complain about pain. Learn to embrace pain and use pain as your motivation to comfort the world.
- We often think life is unfair to us, whereas we are often unfair to our life. The very fact that you are still alive and breathing is the fairness of life.
How to immediately apply Manoranjan Bajpayee’s Jail Success Story into your life now
We all struggle all the time. There are always some challenges or the other in life all the time. I am sure you must also be going through some struggles at this moment. If you find yourself stuck in a situation, all you do is imagine yourself inside a prison-like Manoranjan Bajpayee. Look back into your life and reflect on the pain life has caused you. Accept those pains. Your current prison is your life’s gift to break from the outside world’s noise. Think about what you can learn from the current situation. Take up books and study deeply and correlate with your current situation. Tell yourself, “I am going to write a book about my situation sometime in the near future.”
“Observe, don’t absorb”
Ross Rosenberg
By turning any difficult situations into an opportunity for learning, observing, and reflecting on life, you allow yourself to write about the same in the future, which will then become a future asset for you.
