To begin with, I would like to start by sharing a recent incident that made me think over and change my perspective about the" magnanimous word."

I bought my mother a 24K gold bangle. Beautiful, yellower-than-a-daisy and bright-as-the-sun kind of a thing

She was delighted.

One day my whirlwind-of-a-nephew gets hold of it. He twirls it around in his fingers, holds it up to the light, brings it to his mouth, and before we could even stop him...

Sinks his teeth right into it.

The thing was so soft that it now had tooth-shaped indentations all around.

A jeweler would have to melt it down and work it back into shape if we wanted it restored to its former glory.

But if that gold bangle had had just a bit more zinc, copper and nickel added to it, it'd be tough enough that you couldn't bite into it.

And, you could still call it gold.

But if you added too many other elements, it wouldn't be pure gold anymore.

That got me thinking.

If you're too pure, you lack grit. You end up being so soft that life will chew right through you. Moreover as the saying goes "Anything in its purest form, is either harmful, toxic, or useless."

But if you're too impure, you lose your luster. You end up being such a formless mishmash that there's no telling you’re you.

So it's important to teach our children how to maintain enough purity while also allowing yourself to become worldly, to mix with the dirt of life, to be both hard and bright.

In the process of living our life we somewhere knowingly or unknowingly start following the thing called the Diamond-water paradox.

Diamonds are quite useless but so expensive. Water is useful but valued so less.

Through the ups and downs of life, I've learned that every event is neutral.

It only becomes "good" or "bad” when I attach meaning to it.

In my twenty-some years of life, I've never heard any quote I believe sums up life better than the one my late grandmother used to dictate. It goes:

"Life is a series of rooms, and who we get stuck in those rooms with, adds up to what our lives are."

We all have our own beliefs about fate. As much as we want to believe we have control over our lives, we will never completely control how the people around us influence them. The people in our lives are the wild cards that really define life. It's bits and pieces of all the things you have ever read and all the people you have ever met.

You are made up of every place you have lived in and every person you connected with.

Try to observe the next time you talk to someone you have ever been close to.

If you look hard enough, somewhere you will find yourself.

Life- it's fragile, precious and unpredictable and each day is a gift, not a given right.