100 Rays Of Son - 21

                                                       The Wonderful Gift

  

For a long time, I permanently had a sketch as my profile picture everywhere. It is still there on some websites. At that time many people would ask me as to who sketched my profile picture. Some had assumed that it is one of those software applications which had sketched it out for me. The truth is that this was the birthday present from Rayyan, during his first year in Arena animation, which is the best gift I have received from anyone ever. BTW Rayyan gets to hear the best gift ever so often that he considers it a substitute for thank you in his mother’s dictionary. This picture became so close to my heart and remained to be my profile picture on bloggers, facebook, twitter, Indiblogger and other sites for a long time.

Rayyan has been interested in sketching and drawing since his childhood. He did a sketch of me when he was around 5 years old. 

He loved arts and wanted to make a career out of it. But knowing our education system, it is easy to guess that it was not easy. People kept holding him back, discouraging him that this was not possible. Art and drawing is good for hobby but not for profession. Though as a mother I supported him, I too made a lot of wrong decisions falling under the pressure, especially due to the financial dependency I had back then. Finally Rayyan got into Animation Engineering course in Arena Jayanagar, Bangalore. Surprisingly I had help for this decision making by winning a contest on Indiblogger, a 50,000/- cash prize for my article on 3G which Rayyan encouraged me to write.

Once he was in the field he loved, Rayyan started sounding so happy when he would narrate his learnings of the day. I hadn’t seen him happy learning computer science ever. Even though he was living in a PG, away from home for the first time, he was never bored or sad.  

Within weeks he started sharing his work over internet with me and I was quite impressed and happy with his progress. He was highly dedicated to his learning in Arena and never missed or left any project incomplete. He joined Arena in June and by October he secretly sketched this image and sent it to me on my birthday. I have never been as happy looking at a picture of Farida as I had been on that day. It was a lovely feeling, being created by a person you created in the first place.

I also realized the importance of allowing our children to make their own career choices, because they will be doing it for almost half of their life span they spend on this earth. Off course the calculation was done by Rayyan