There lived a great poet called Bharavi. He was very learned. He was knowledgeable in all Vedas and had command over poetry. For his excellence, Bharavi was praised by the King, by fellow scholars, by his mother, and also by his wife. However, his own father never ever praised him, not even once.
Once, there was a ceremony in the Kingdom where Bharavi was honored as the best poet. Even after the ceremony, Bharavi’s father chose to ignore praising him. Bharavi was highly irritated. He often told his mother to ask his father why he was never praised by the father. But the mother was also equally scared. Finally, Bharavi was so full of hate for his father that he took a big club, climbed the attic and waited for his father so that he could hit him on the back of the head with the club from above.
Coincidentally on the very same day, the mother asked the father why he never praised his son. The father replied that if he praised his son he feared that his son’s lifespan would decrease, and his son may not work hard to improve himself. Mother reported the story to her son.
Bharavi realized how foolish he had been to think of hitting his father with a club. His father only wanted him to do well. He set aside the club, jumped down from the attic and fell at his father’s feet. He asked his father to punish him for what he had intended to do. He told his father that he had intended to hit him with a club.
The father told Bharavi that there was no punishment needed and that he had been forgiven unconditionally. However, Bharavi insisted. Bharavi’s father asked him to go and stay with his in-law’s for six months and then come back home.
Bharavi left home without knowing the implication of his father’s word.
On the first day, Bharavi was served very good food at the in-laws’ house and was treated very well. But with every passing day, he was treated with more and more disdain. Towards the end of six months, Bharavi was not respected for his poetry or erudition at all. Rather he was treated as a manservant in his in-laws house. He was responsible for cooking and cleaning, for washing the dishes and cleaning the soiled clothes and the dirt in the house, and for the farm-related work. He was treated like a cheap farm hand. He was under-fed and over-worked.
He missed his King and Kingdom, his Vedas and his poetry, his mother and most of all; he missed his father and father’s home. All of a sudden, he knew the true value of what it was like to be in his father’s home where silence meant nothing less than great praise!