We were talking about attitude recently, and a senior of mine, who has just completed his masters from an IIT, expressed his disappointment at the attitude of students in IIT; the students who are the brightest minds in the country, the students who are to be the future of the nation. He would get really frustrated seeing them leave the lights and fans switched on all the time. In his hostel, there was a toilet flush which would keep flowing, if, after use, the knob was not manually turned the other way round, and amazingly, there were very few students who would take the 'pain' of doing this simple thing. My senior put up a notice in the toilet drawing attention to the problem and listed the simple solution. Nothing changed.

In contrast, another senior of mine narrated another tale about the attitude of a four year old child. He was travelling by a train in Germany by which a four year old girl and her father were also travelling. The girl was licking an ice cream cone in her hand when the ice cream fell on the floor. Silently, the girl took out a polythene bag from her father's bundle, picked up the stuff from the floor and put it in the bag. She then took her handkerchief, wiped the floor with it, put the handkerchief in the polythene and replaced the polythene back in her father's bundle. And all this while, her father took no notice of what the little girl was doing and kept looking out of the window.