#11 reasons why kids are way cooler than us

Kids are natural teachers! The way they go about living can be very inspiring if we choose to look at it that way.. There are a lot of things to be learnt from these little bundles of pure awesomeness! So without further ado, let me get right down to business..

#1. Divine Curio: Kids teach us how to be curious just about everything on the surface of the planet! Kids don't learn to impress or get marks or get something monetary out of it. Kids learn out of genuine curiosity and for the sheer pleasure of learning. That is why kids are able to assimilate an unbelievable amount of information at an unbelievable pace! By the time we reach our late teens, 'learning out of curiosity' becomes something reserved for a special species called 'nerds'. By the time we reach our early twenties our curiosity would have had a formal funeral.

#2. Kick Your Prejudices: Kids teach us to be fair- to value human beings for what they are and not for what they have or what they can get out of them or what they look like or what they are born into. It doesn't matter to them if you are rich or poor or black or white or asian or pretty or ugly or a Hindu or a Muslim. We are not born with prejudices. As we grow up, we let the world get to us.  Kids love people who love them. It's that simple. All the faiths, races, castes and man-made boundaries hold no meaning to a kid.

A beautiful Airtel ad that shows that kids don't recognize borders

#3. Enthusiasm and the fountain of youth: Kids are wildly enthusiastic and insanely optimistic. Kids are uninhibited dreamers. Kids expect miracles. If we lose our enthusiasm and stop expecting miracles (not the tooth-fairy kind but miracles apropos to us) to come about in our lives, then what is the point of that life? After all, what is the fountain of youth but that sense of unadulterated, pristine optimism?

Alice laughed: "There's no use trying," she said; "one can't believe impossible things."

"I daresay you haven't had much practice," said the Queen. "When I was younger, I always did it for half an hour a day. Why, sometimes I've believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast."

 #4. Decide to have fun: When kids decide to have a nice time they really do! When they decide to be happy, they let nothing get in their way of happiness! I recently saw a film called 'The boy in striped pyjamas' It's about how a Jewish kid befriends a German officer's kid and how they have fun in a concentration camp! A friggin concentration camp! An excellent film that teaches us that having fun is a choice. 'Life is Beautiful' is another movie where the protagonist, a Jewish father (a kid in his own right by virtue of his sense of life) makes surviving in a concentration camp look like a game to his son, so that he starts enjoying it. Highly recommended!

#5. The power of certainty: Kids are full of certainty. And that's why kids are fast decision makers. They know what they want. Ask them about what toy they want in a toy store and you get a definite answer. Ask them about their future and you get a clear, certain answer- its always an "I'm gonna become a scientist" or "I will become a doctor" and never an "I'd like to...". Talk about the power of certainty..

#6. Play Naked: Kids are never embarrassed of who they are. They are themselves always- in a slum and in a palace alike! They wear their personalities like a badge, proudly! An enlightened friend of mine, recently shared a story by Osho. It goes something like this: "Enjoy your time at the party but behave yourself at all times!" says a mom to her child. "Mom, you need to make your mind up quick! Should I behave myself or enjoy myself?" asks the kid. Kids are never reluctant to play naked if that makes them happy because they are comfortable in their own skin. Literally! That's a luxury we can't afford but hey, I'm just trying to drive home a point!

#7. Sky is the limit? Kids do not have a mindset of limitations. They simply don't know to put boundaries to their abilities. Many of us would have had the chance to go on a trek with our families. In those trips, we might have observed how the youngest kid never seems to get tired. Ever! While we just sit down panting, the kid zips past us putting us to shame. And he seems to just can't get enough. Does the kid face the same amount of physical strain as we do? Yes. So the reason for limitless energy is that world hasn't begun selling him the lie of how the human body has limits just like everything and how one is supposed to get exhausted after a certain amount of activity. [Stop it already with the 'world and its sneaky conspiracies', we get it! :p]

To call Reshat Mati a prodigy would be an understatement.

This kid is the title holder in 3 streams of fighting- Boxing, Kickboxing (Muay Thai) and MMA. Limits, anyone?

#8. Persistence, thy name is kid: Kids aren't afraid or embarrassed of failing. Not even a little. They just can't care less about their image. Now, that's true intransigence. How does a kid learn to walk? By falling and getting up every time and trying again. If not for the kid in us who relentlessly tried to walk, even after falling countless times, unmindful of how he or she'd be perceived, we'd all be still crawling now. Not a pretty sight at all..

A must watch ad. There's a kind of magic that stems from persistence.

 Persistence can get support from unexpected avenues!

#9. On the face: Kids wear their heart on their sleeves. We might have all heard the story where the entire kingdom calls the emperor's clothes exquisite, but a kid laughs at him and yells out "puppy shame!" Kids are never afraid to call a spade, a spade. The truest and the most straightforward reactions and opinions can be elicited only from kids. And kids don't feel ashamed to cry in public. Contrary to the accepted belief, a man who cries isn't weak but too self-assured to try to hide his tears. The point is that pretense isn't one of kids' strong points!

#10. Kids cherish what they have: Kids are undoubtedly, the most offensively possessive beings around. They can be possessive just about everything they can hope to put a claim on, right from a wheel-less toy bike, to a chair in the park, to their parents. While being possessive may be a sign of immaturity, the underlying principle is that kids know and recognize the value of things they have. If only we knew to..

#11. Blessed are the unreasonable, for they shall inherit the earth: Kids can be unreasonable at times. When they decide they want something, they can get pretty adamant about it and it can be real pain in the neck! But on further thinking, it strikes us that, that precise quality is what's found in the greatest of men. Mahatma Gandhi must have sounded unreasonable when he said that a war could be fought without a weapon. Roger Bannister must have been called unreasonable when he dreamed of breaking the four-minute mile barrier. Marconi was called unreasonable and even insane when he proposed that messages could be transmitted over air. Who had the last laugh?

Apple's timeless Think Different campaign. It showcases 'unreasonable' people.

All these points are, more or less, subtle manifestations of the fact that kids are free of the opinions of others. They are yet to become corrupt by society's slow, pernicious conditioning. So much so, that it's surprising to even think we all were once kids. It's a distant memory, almost forgotten. Is life losing all these qualities and attaining a state of necrotic maturity? What does this world turn us into? Or rather, what do we let the world do to us? What happened to the fearless dreamer that once existed so proudly within the same body? Why do we shamelessly bury him or her, in the sands of life's mundane realism and call it practicality? Is that what growing up is all about- gradually dying? If that's the case, the biggest challenge of growing up is to never let the kid in us perish for he or she represents the best within us!