Two decades ago my mother and my ammamma were going from Bengaluru to Tumakuru, to our native place. It was summer. They had got as far as a transit hub when my grandmother, already exhausted, fainted.
The street was nearly empty. No shop, no bakery, nobody to ask. A fellow traveller happened to be carrying water and gave it to them.
My mother took two things from that afternoon. The first was obvious — always carry water. The second was hers, and she arrived at it herself: carry it even when you don't need it, because it may be for someone else. She has repeated it ever since.
She told me this to explain why I should never step out without a bottle. The first time, I said I didn't need it and I wasn't going to carry it. Not long after, I was out somewhere and needed water badly and there was none. I came home and she said, I told you so. I said fine.
After that I went the other way. For years I carried two large bottles in my bag, which anyone who knew me then can confirm was excessive. Two, because I didn't like drinking from a bottle after someone else's lips had touched the rim — so one was mine and one was for giving away. I have handed that second bottle to strangers many times.
In my final year of engineering I wrote this story in an aptitude test, in a pooled campus recruitment drive. The question asked about an experience. In the third round the interviewer brought it up and asked me what it meant. I told him it was real, it was my mother's, and I followed it. I don't know whether it helped. There was one more round after that, and then I got the job.
Today the story sounds dated. You can have water at your door in ten minutes, or walk to a supermarket or a mom-and-pop store at the end of any urban street. That is exactly the point. My grandmother fainted somewhere that had none of those things, and plenty of places still don't, and the stranger who helped had no way of knowing she would be needed that afternoon.
I still carry this story with me, and I still do it, albeit not as religiously as before.