To be at peace with oneself

Being at peace with oneself is the best thing we can do for ourselves.

 

A person who is at peace with himself is at peace with the whole world.

 

When something goes wrong, we often take up the noble duty of criticizing ourselves mercilessly, ignoring the fact that every human being has follies, and he has full right to fail once in a while. In place of blaming or cursing ourselves if we take a stock of our own nature, we will always be calm. At peace with ourselves. Even if we commit a great blunder.

 

To be at peace with oneself one has to know oneself thoroughly and accept, love and forgive. Humbly acknowledge one’s virtues and try to improve them. Accept one’s vices with humility and try to rectify them if possible. If not then try to control them as much as possible.

 

A person who can’t do this is really one of the unluckiest persons.

True religion

I am not one of them who think religion is an outdated concept. I believe in God and I believe that most of the religions teach a good way of life. And I prefer to pay a lot of attention to all the religious words and pick up the best ones for me and try to follow them.

 

I am very lazy, so instead of raking my own mind for a suitable code of conduct I prefer the knowledge left by my ancestors. All I do is brush them up and make them suitable for the present age. I don’t follow any one blindly, not even myself.

 

I believe a true religion never provokes its followers to mock, insult or harm any innocent living being.  It never boasts about its superiority above other religions. It never insults, mocks or berates the belief of others. It just simply unfolds its beauty like  a flower and let every one decide its worth.

Another martyr : Satish Shetty

He had the courage of speaking out against corruption. The guts of challenging the powerful, corrupted people. So they chased him and killed him. If it was in some Western country I would have been hopeful that he will get his justice in Court. Can I hope the same here in India too? Chances are very slim, so all I can say that my deepest, wholehearted tributes are for him and all brave souls like him. Who had the courage of standing up and fighting evil.

 

I will wait for the day when the blood of these martyrs will result in punishing the evil-doers. Or better, their blood shall not be shed at all. The law will do its job and evil doers wont dare to flourish that much..

Power and corruption

Why power is directly related to corruption? That is a question which has haunted me since my childhood days. I guess if we give someone ultimate power and convince him of that fact there are slim chances that he won’t abuse it.

 

There are very rare examples of such persons, who have the self control of an angel, who after being bestowed with immense power have not misused it. A little greater number succeeds in avoiding abuse though. They only end up misusing the power.

 

In today’s world power should be laid on people, organizations in such a manner that it can be revoked if needed. No one should be given the ultimate power because it certainly corrupts.

Ignorance about human trafficking

Ignorance can be really deadly in today’s world.  I was reading a news item in a newspaper just a few days back. It really was painful. A group of Indians eating langar in an Afghan gurudwara. They have been tricked by cunning agents there and have lost all their money, even passport and visa.

 

Government should be thinking about this trend seriously. It’s becoming a every day affair like human trafficking. Along with the government we educated persons too should try to spread the cautions against human trafficking of any sort.

 

Its really painful to think that a person sold off every thing that he owned hoping for a beautiful future and ended up in a foreign land, abused.

 

honour

Recently I was discussing about honour with some of my friends. I never think about any thing superficially, I either think or do not think about it. So my thought express started its journey toward the station called reputation or honour.

 

Being born in a country where women burnt themselves alive in fear of being dishonoured I can understand this passion very easily. I have grown up reading about Rani Padmini, the divine beauty who killed herself happily so she does not have to surrender to an emperor. Who of course wanted to legally marry her. In childhood I adored her courage and after growing up I realized her self respect.

 

Some people will follow her without hesitation and others will compromise. Human passions are really a very interesting field to study, a very enjoyable show to watch. I love to gather as much as I can about human nature, feelings and passions and then watch the show called human life.

Respecting oneself

People often think that I am arrogant. The reason is I don’t think that I am inferior to any one. I always treat others with respect and demand the same from them. I think I don’t have any right to disrespect others and vice versa unless one crosses one’s limit, that is, insults or misuses the respect bestowed upon him.

 

I think there is a difference between humility and inferiority complex. We all should practice humility, that is, if we are blessed with a talent we should never think that we are something extraordinary. But we should always think that we are human beings and we have full right to live a life of dignity and respect.

 

A person who does not respects oneself can’t respect others either. He may get intimidated by others or cower before them, but can he respect them? I believe not.

 

I believe in a simple policy. I walk my path with confidence on myself and others. I neither think that I am inferior to anyone, nor do I think I am superior to any one. We all have our vices and virtues.

Marriage vs live together

Whether to make Live in relationships legal … This is one of the latest debates which is troubling traditional Indian minds. What are the plus points of live together?

 

1. You can check thoroughly before marrying if your spouse is as tempting as he was as a suitor. You will be able to judge each other completely before taking the holy oath of marriage.
2. As you have checked each other thoroughly before marrying, chances of divorce or marital dispute may slice down a lot.
3. If you two don’t find each other compatible you will be able to walk away without feeling social stigma which today’s youth have to face, branding it as immoral lifestyle.
4. You wont be tied up with a person you don’t like or have stopped liking for the rest of your life.

 

Now the minus points…

 

1.                  If your partner is a flirt under cover he or she may use and dump you without even looking back. Which in case of marriage law will force him to.

2.                  The health hazards of multiple broken relationships with multiple partners, which will become an inseparable part of live-in relationships once the social stigma is gone.

3.                  The risky life of children born out of such relationships, what will happen to them when their parents will enter one relationship after another along with them? How will they be treated by the other partners?

4.                  Reaping all sorts of profit including monetary will be easy for a untrustworthy partner. You may walk back to home one fine evening and see your mate has disappeared with all you have given him, or all she has bought with your money.

 

Now comes the holy matrimony. Its pluses are-

 

1.                  If two stable persons get married there is high possibility that they will live a life together. Of course with some up and down, but they will mend this relationship.

2.                  Two serious spouses will give a healthy environment for each other, children.

3.                  As their life will be tension free regarding family they will be better citizens and happier citizens.

4.                  In today’s world of STD and HIV one mate is the most desperately needed thing in world.

 

Minus points of holy matrimony:

 

1.                  If your spouse is exactly your opposite and you are somehow trapped together, and none is interested to change, you both are doomed.

2.                  If you both have separate perspective on every thing under the sky you both will both live a choking life.

3.                  If your spouse is a cheater.. on any ground, it can be in love, duty, behaviour any thing you are simply doomed.

4.                  If every thing else is perfect but you are not able to love each other, your life will feel like being wasted.

Swami Vivekananda

“Arise! Awake! And stop not till the goal is reached.”

 

- Vivekananda

 

I sometimes feel really upset about my incapability in remembering birthdays of great people. Even if they are my heroes like swami Vivekananda. There are only two of them I remember clearly, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose and of course Tagore. But even then I often forget on the date and these days, newspapers or media does not reminds us either. Gone are those sweet days when every newspaper announced the birthdays of these great personalities on the front page, now we keep track of day to day life of celebrities.

 

Swamiji was my type of hero. He dedicated his whole life for the well being of the deprived people. Left behind the legacy of Ram Krishna Mission. This still works tirelessly in the field.

 

His biography collected from internet: A spiritual genius of commanding intellect and power, Vivekananda crammed immense labor and achievement into his short life, 1863-1902 (6^th January, 1863 to July 4, 1902). Born in the Datta family of Calcutta, the youthful Vivekananda embraced the agnostic philosophies of the Western mind along with the worship of science.

 

At the same time, vehement in his desire to know the truth about God, he questioned people of holy reputation, asking them if they had seen God. He found such a person in Sri Ramakrishna, who became his teacher, allayed his doubts, gave him the vision of God, and transformed him into sage and prophet with authority to teach.

 

After Sri Ramakrishna's death, Vivekananda renounced the world and criss-crossed India as a wandering monk. His mounting compassion for India's people drove him to seek material help from the West. Accepting an opportunity to represent Hinduism at Chicago's Parliament of Religions in 1893, Vivekananda won instant celebrity in America and a ready forum for his spiritual teaching.

 

For three years he spread the Vedanta philosophy and religion in America and England and then returned to India to found the Ramakrishna Math and Mission. Exhorting his nation to spiritual greatness, he wakened India to a new national consciousness. He died July 4, 1902, after a second, much shorter sojourn in the West. His lectures and writings have been gathered into nine volumes.

 

Any one who wants to know a little more :

http://www.writespirit.net/authors/swami_vivekananda/biography-swami-vivekananda/

 

http://www.vivekananda.org/biography.asp

Loving oneself

We are born and brought up with teachings that slowly and firmly instill a belief in us, that is, loving oneself is selfish. But if we honestly think, then we will realize, loving oneself is the natural thing. Every living being first loves him or her then others. There is nothing wrong in that. It becomes wrong if we sacrifice or use others for the sake of our well being.

 

There is a vast difference between loving oneself than others and using others for one’s happiness. I can always love myself more than anyone else yet live a completely unselfish life. A life without cheating or abusing anyone.

 

I believe to love and respect others one has to love and respect oneself first. Otherwise we will never be able to love and respect others.

 

If we love and respect ourselves truly, just the way we are that will work for our advantage. It will rid us of jealousy, inferiority complex etc.

 

I believe that it increases our capacity of loving others too. To love and accept others just the way they are. As we love and accept ourselves with all our vices and virtues. That teaches us that no one is perfect, but still every one is lovable. If we can love ourselves then we can love others too.

Tribals in India

Tribals plight unpalatable’

NEW DELHI, 27 AUG: Describing as “unpalatable” the condition of tribals in the country, vice president Mr M Hamid Ansari today said the struggle to retain their identities and seek empowerment through the Constitutional framework has not yielded “commensurate outcomes”.

“For the 85 million scheduled tribes in India, the struggle to retain their identities and seek empowerment through our Constitutional framework has not yielded commensurate outcomes,” vice president said after inaugurating an international seminar on 'Adivasi/ST Communities in India: Development and Change'. The event was organised by the Institute of Human Development and supported by UNICEF, IFAD and Planning Commission.

Mr Ansari questioned whether “Adivasis” have been accorded the equality of opportunity or treated with “greater” attention and justice as per the Objective Resolution tabled by the first Prime Minister Pandit Jawahar Lal Nehru in the Constituent Assembly in 1946.
“The reality is unpalatable and the data speaks for itself,” he added. PTI

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I have always had a soft spot for Tribals. A truth which I can’t deny. Their innocence and honesty is irresistible to me.

 

Being born and brought up in a family of landlords I have had the privilege of mixing with them closely.

 

We had one woman working at our ancestral home for years. That woman was so honest that the whole house was left in her hands, with utensils worth thousands of rupees and other things which might have added up to another few thousands. While the whole family was scattered all over India she guarded that house.

 

She used to maintain that house like her own. We realized her dedication after she left to live with her nephew. Who used and threw her away. The last news I had of her was she was living with one of my relatives happily.

 

Every one will be able to understand the level of her honesty. I won’t have to elaborate it.

 

There was another couple who used to come to work for us at burdwan and in our ancestral home. This couple worked alone in houses littered with jewelry and cash, not a single thing was ever misplaced. But that did not meant they were hermits, if they liked some thing very much they asked us for that. They were really cute. I still remember when they used to come to work in our Burdwan house they always begged us for audio cassettes, we used to keep all the audio cassettes which we did not liked much for them. Their childish longing for them never ended.

 

My next brush with tribals was during my journey from burdwan to Kolkata. These people work in the fields of others during harvest for a meager amount. They used to throng in the trains, the thing which touched my heart was they never sat in the seats because they did not had the money to buy the tickets. I myself have often asked them to sit in the seats as they were empty but they never did, they sat on the floor chatting like a bunch of birds.

 

Even the ticket collectors knew that they won’t steal a thread. I too have noted it and have done it myself. No one bothered to grab her purse in case she was going away from the seat for a while.

 

When people like them suffer it’s a little shame to the society.

thin line

Wise people say that human beings are only animal who think about the outcome of an action before acting and act likewise. This is the thin line between human and animal behaviour.

 

Are we crossing the line a bit too often and venturing too deep in the animal world? So rapidly and deeply that we have fears of becoming one of them? I will just share a few examples and ask you if I am thinking too negatively.

 

Every one loves a good joke, once upon a time people knew that every one does not shares same sense of humor, so they used to judge the taste of others before cracking a joke in public place, especially places like office, school or college. I joined a Medical Transcription Course last year; I have met quite a handful of people there who have left me a little confused, if they are human beings or animals wearing human skin. In my entire life I have never seen people discussing obscene things so openly and loudly, through out the day. I truly have left them behind with a deep suspicion that they are not mentally sane.

 

Just like that, I believe in today’s world most of the people do corrupted things not because they don’t have enough, but because they want more than they need. This is one vice absent in animals though. It’s found in only human beings and its escalating.

 

Another horrible thing is raising cruelty against children by adults. By children I mean any one who is below 21 years of age. In place of protective tendency for them they are being abused and often deliberately endangered. Like bombing in places full of children.

 

All I can hope for myself is I never join them. They are so many in numbers that I sometimes suspect that I walk an untrodden path.

Mother teresa

As an Indian who is very much aware about the pain and suffering of her fellow countrymen my head bows for the saint of kolkata..Mother Teresa. We know very little about her, I collected this information from net on her birthday:

Special prayers were held at the headquarters of the Missionaries of Charity on 26th August, 2009, Wednesday on the occasion of Mother Teresa's 99th birth anniversary.

Mother Teresa's date of birth is disputed: "So unconcerned was she about accuracy in relation to the chronicling of her own life, and so disinclined actually to read anything written about her, that for many years and in a succession of books her birth date was erroneously recorded as 27 August 1910. It even appeared in the Indian Loreto Entrance Book as her date of birth. In fact, as she confided to her friend, co-worker and American author, Eileen Egan, that was the date on which she was christened Agnes Gonxha Bojaxhiu. The date which marked the beginning of her Christian life was undoubtedly the more important to Mother Teresa, but she was none the less actually born in Skopje, Serbia, on the previous day."

Albanian born Mother Teresa made Kolkata her home and dedicated her life to the service of the poor and the destitute.

Mother Teresa was beatified by the Pope in October 2003, paving the way for her canonization, or being declared a saint.

She qualified for beatification after Vatican officials acknowledged that she was responsible for a miracle in which an Indian woman was cured of stomach cancer through her intervention.
Mother Teresa died at the age of 87 on September 5, 1997. She was popularly known as the "Saint of the Gutter" due to her extraordinary love and dedication for poor, homeless and diseased people.

Teresa came to India in 1929 at the age of 18 and took up teaching and became an Indian citizen in 1948.

The nun started working in slums and later set up her Missionaries of Charity, which was approved by the Vatican in 1950.

The organization now runs more than 500 charity homes in over 100 countries.

Mother Teresa received several national and international awards for the social service that she did during her lifetime. They include the Magsaysay Award in 1962, the Pope John XXIII Peace Prize in 1971, the John F. Kennedy International Award in 1971 and the Nobel Peace Prize in 1979.

This poem was written by Mother Teresa and is engraved on the wall of her home for children in Calcutta.

People are often unreasonable, illogical, & self-centered; forgive them anyway.

If you are kind, People may accuse you of selfish, ulterior motives; Be kind anyway.

If you are successful, you will win some false friends and some true enemies; succeed anyway.

If you are honest and frank, people may cheat you; be honest and frank anyway.

What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight: Build anyway.

If you find serenity and happiness, they may be jealous; be happy anyway.

The good you do today, people will often forget tomorrow; do good anyway.

Give the world the best you have, and it may never be enough; Give the world the best you've got anyway.

You see, in the final analysis, it is between you and God; It was never between you and them anyway.

Mass illiteracy

Political Science was one of my subjects up to graduation, my last landmark in traditional studies. After that my studies were limited to the vocational fields or fields of personal interest.

I was quite intrigued to know that Indian constitution have been borrowed from the constitution of UK and USA, two greatest landmarks of democracy. Then the next question immediately popped up, why are we such a failure in their comparison then? It opened a window of search in my mind. This forever searches and improves itself.

We can’t deny one thing that we have achieved a lot, but still we are failing in some grounds. Especially in the ground of human rights. My search window says the main reason behind this failure is most of Indians are not aware of their own human rights. So it’s easy to steal it from them. If someone left me a box of jewels without telling me its mine I will not care much if someone steals it. But if I knew that they are mine I will take care of it and most probably protect it too.

It somehow again points the fingers back to ourselves, the minority people of India who are educated and politically aware. The majority of Indians who live under poverty level and are illiterate/semiliterate act as a man handcuffed with us, who have rock tied around their neck, rock of illiteracy, poverty As a result we both sink together.

We will never be able to swim unless we free them from that rock called poverty and illiteracy. We will have to swim together to reach the shores.

Either we will have to ensure that they receive the necessary knowledge or we will have to share that knowledge with them. Living as a social animal is not a very easy thing to do. We have a collective responsibility towards each other. If we stand for each other we walk together for a greater future, if we fail each other we both fall together.

Making reservations under quota is hardly the solution. Giving money and power to a person who cant handle it is the worst mistake a society can make. If you want to give a person money and power you should first make him capable of digesting it. We can see that history has proved its authenticity through communism.

If we take a bird out of cage and set it free it will perish, because it will never be able to adjust itself to the immense responsibility that comes with liberty.

This is a lesson we can learn from our own society if we introspect seriously.

Satisfaction

Every human being should be satisfied about these things:

 

First, his roots, because his roots are the power that is holding him to the ground. Without it no matter how beautiful his present is it will not stay that way. If you have a root, a family which is worthy of being proud of, better be so. Because having a confidence about one’s background always adds some extra confidence and grace to his present.

 

Second, his culture and heritage, a person is incomplete without this. When we come across other human beings we often get too much influenced by their culture or ways of life, because every society shows its best self to an outsider, as a result we often look down upon our own culture. Sooner or later we feel like a fool for doing that so better not do it at all. Every culture has its share of vices and virtues, respect your culture for its virtues and try to adapt the virtues of other cultures. But don’t look down upon your own identity. It will not do you any good. Nor should you disrespect others. That certainly will do you bad.

 

Third is your parents, if they are not monsters, if they are monsters you can walk away from them and do your duties from a distance otherwise never look down upon them. They are the one who brought you in this earth and took care of you when you were too feeble to even eat. I have seen people grumble about their parents and later curse themselves endlessly when they have passed away forever.

 

Fourth, your true friends, they are the only people who love you absolutely unselfishly, with all your silly ways. So, you too should love them with all their silly ways.

 

Fifth, life in general, never grumble about your life, try to change it for better but be happy with what you have already and try to relish it as much as you can. If you grumble too much about what you have think about those who are in the last stage of a terminal disease, they will happily accept all your problems because you are and will be alive for days to come.

 

Its good to improve ourselves, that’s a thing which should be done through out our life but its foundation should lie on a happy life, happy mind. Not a miserable mind and a wretched life.

Happy New Year!