A Story

Not long ago a wise person once told me a story. And I told Shilpa that I will write about it in response to her comment on my blog so here it is...

The story goes like this and it is retold by me so bear with mistakes and inconsistencies.

In England apparently they would remove the grass that grew in front of all important buildings during winter, roll it up, take it to a green house so that they can maintain it from getting destroyed and bring it back the following spring. This made the grass look green and healthy. So one researcher took it upon himself to do a small but long experiment.

He chose a ten acre piece of land and divided it into two halves. On both halves he sowed grass seeds, but he chose to maintain one like what they did to the grass in front of the buildings and the other he decided to let it grow on its own.

After ten years he conducted an experiment to check out what was left in terms of strain in the grass the grew on the two halves.

The first half, the well maintained one, showed that there was only one strain of grass left in it.
The other half, the naturally growing one, showed that there were about ten strains of grass still left in it from the original mix. One strain survived in moisture, while another survived rot, another was strong in winter, while one was strong in summer and so on. There was a diversity here that made the grass always look green.

The first half, well maintained strain would not survive past a spring if it were left to be on its own. All the other dominant strains had died and only one survived.

The moral of the story is that the more diverse we are the more strong our chances of survival is. If we try and force to make all of us to think alike and believe in everything alike, then we will never be able to survive past one summer...I think this story is very apt in the current scenario.