The Little Boy and the Red Ball

Slightly unsettling story that has the potential to lead to a good bit of introspection, written by Sourabh Phadke

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The Little Boy and the Red Ball

Now I’m going to tell you this story very slowly.
Slowly, since I want you to see the story.
It’s called ‘The Little Boy and The Red Ball’.

There was once a little boy with defective eyes.
If you showed him the colour Red, he would see Blue.
So you would show him a Red ball, but he would see a Blue ball.
You would show him a Red apple, and a Blue apple would be what he saw.
You’d show him a Red crayon, and he would see a Blue crayon.
So our little boy with defective eyes started going to school.
There amongst many other things, they decided to teach him ‘Colours’.
So one day the teacher sat him down and showed him a Red ball.
“Little boy, do you know what colour this ball is? It’s called ‘Red’. That’s spelt as R-E-D and pronounced as ‘Red’.”
So the little boy who saw the ball as blue, learnt that the colour was called ‘Red’.
Spelt as R-E-D and pronounced, ‘Red’.
So you would put three coloured balls in front of the little boy: One Blue, One Yellow and One Red, and would ask him to choose the ‘Red’ ball.
And the little boy would pick the correct ball up even though he saw it as blue.
He saw it as Blue but had learnt it as ‘Red’.
So you would throw a Red ball at him, and he would catch a ball which was Blue.
You would ask him to bite into a big, Red, juicy apple, and he would bite into an apple which was big, Blue and juicy.
You would ask him to draw a pretty Red rose with a Red crayon, and he would draw a pretty rose which was as blue as all the other pretty roses he had seen.
But he would call it ‘Red’ since that’s how you spell the colour: R-E-D, pronounced ‘Red’.
But there’s a slight problem with our story.
One which we can’t even see.
We would never find out about the defect in the little boy’s eyes since we saw a Red ball and called it ‘Red’ while he saw the ball as ‘Blue’ and yet called it ‘Red’.
The little boy never saw our ‘Red’ and we his ‘Blue’.
It was all ‘Red’ for us.
Spelt as R-E-D, which is pronounced ‘Red’. Period.
So perhaps the little boy didn’t really have ‘defective’ eyes.
His eyes were perfect and beautiful, only because they were his own.
And perhaps we all are little boys and little girls with perfect and beautiful eyes.
And the ball is ‘Red’. Spelt as R-E-D, which is pronounced as: ‘Red’.