Skip to main content

Perspective




Perspective matters more than anything else because it determines how you see the world and how you see determines what you do with it.  All these people who go about fighting and killing in the name of their gods and totems have their own perspectives.  Those who create the flyovers and skyscrapers have their perspectives too.  What should really worry us is the importance enjoyed by the fighter and the killer while the builder remains in the darkness of the background. 

The fighters and killers have become important because our own perspectives are so limited, so contaminated and so perverted.  If only we could see a world in a grain of sand, like William Blake, and heaven in a wild flower, we would be infinitely more spiritual than all these fighters and killers who claim to be god’s own people. 

As Albert Einstein said, a person who is religiously enlightened is one who has liberated himself from the fetters of his selfish desires and is preoccupied with thoughts, feelings and aspirations that foster the welfare of all creatures, of the planet itself.  Religion is a relationship.  Religion is a benign relationship.  It can never seek the destruction of anyone.

That’s why what is being promoted in the country nowadays in the name of religion is not religion at all.  It is just a perversion. 

The remedy is to widen our perspectives.  Learn more.  Understand more.  Reach out for the stars and you will see the wild flower opening up a heaven at your feet.  The perspective makes all the difference. 

Comments

  1. The last paragraph is deep. I will remember to use it at an appropriate place in the near future.

    What creates a false sense of nationalism? The soldiers, the enemies, the deaths and the martyrs. Can building a bridge, hospitals, research institutes, museums etc have that effect on the spirit of nationalism?

    One has not only to see everything but be everything to have a broader perspective.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. False nationalism is a product of ignorance or sheer villainy. Villains generally have political agenda. Ignorance has many faces like a student of mine who is now a lawyer and believes that Hinduism is in danger and hence requires militant defenders!

      Being everything is an eminent idea. Mystics are capable of that.

      Delete
  2. Better to be a fence-sitter. Makes you open to perspectives from differing ideologies. But that's not so easy, is it?

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

The Adventures of Toto as a comic strip

  'The Adventures of Toto' is an amusing story by Ruskin Bond. It is prescribed as a lesson in CBSE's English course for class 9. Maggie asked her students to do a project on some of the lessons and Femi George's work is what I would like to present here. Femi converted the story into a beautiful comic strip. Her work will speak for itself and let me present it below.  Femi George Student of Carmel Public School, Vazhakulam, Kerala Similar post: The Little Girl

Two Nuns and two questions

The nuns kept in custody  Two Catholic nuns were arrested on 25 July 2025 at Durg railway station for allegedly trafficking tribal women from Narayanpur in Chhattisgarh to Agra in UP. Today’s newspapers in Kerala have expressed their contempt of the act more vehemently than I had expected. It seems secularism has hope yet in this country. For those who are not aware of the incident, two nuns were arrested because some criminals of a depraved organisation called Bajrang Dal in Chhattisgarh chose to conclude that the nuns were committing the crime of human-trafficking. Since that charge wouldn’t stick, because the women confessed that they were going voluntarily to take up jobs with the help of the nuns in order to raise their families from miserable poverty in a country that claims to be a $5-tillion-economy, another charge was fabricated that the nuns had indulged in religious conversion. Now let us look at certain facts. Though I keep questioning the Christian churches for...

Missing Women of Dharmasthala

The entrance to the temple Dharmasthala:  The Shadows Behind the Sanctum Ananya Bhatt, a young medical student from Manipal, visited the Dharmasthala Temple and she never returned to her hostel. She vanished without a trace. That was in 2003. Her mother, Sujata Bhatt, a stenographer working with the CBI, rushed to the temple town in search of her daughter. Some residents told her that they had seen Ananya walking with the temple officials. The local police refused to help in any way. Soon Sujata was abducted by three men, assaulted, and rendered unconscious. She woke up months later in a hospital in Bangalore (Bengaluru). Now more than two decades later, she is back in the temple premises to find her daughter’s remains and perform her last rites. Because a former sanitation worker of the temple came to the local court a few days back with a human skeleton and the confession that he had buried countless schoolgirls in uniform and other young women in the temple premises. This ma...

The Chhattisgarh Story

Deforestation in Chhattisgarh Kerala’s Catholic Church is teeming with rage these days because of the arrest of two nuns in Chhattisgarh on false charges. No one seems to understand the real politics behind the Modi government’s enmity towards Christian missionaries in Chhattisgarh as well as other backward states in its neighbourhood. Modi is selling the tribal areas and forestlands to the corporate sector part by part, his friend Adani being the chief benefactor. The Christian missionaries are a severe hindrance in that commerce. Let us get some facts right, at least. The Adivasi villagers allege that Gram Sabhas (local governing bodies) were forged or manipulated under pressure from Adani and the BJP government officials in order to take away their lands. In Hasdeo Aranya, minutes of the local body meetings were altered to show the villagers’ consent for land transfers. Also, the Chhattisgarh Scheduled Tribes Commission found that Panchayat secretaries were detained and coerc...

The Little Girl

The Little Girl is a short story by Katherine Mansfield given in the class 9 English course of NCERT. Maggie gave an assignment to her students based on the story and one of her students, Athena Baby Sabu, presented a brilliant job. She converted the story into a delightful comic strip. Mansfield tells the story of Kezia who is the eponymous little girl. Kezia is scared of her father who wields a lot of control on the entire family. She is punished severely for an unwitting mistake which makes her even more scared of her father. Her grandmother is fond of her and is her emotional succour. The grandmother is away from home one day with Kezia's mother who is hospitalised. Kezia gets her usual nightmare and is terrified. There is no one at home to console her except her father from whom she does not expect any consolation. But the father rises to the occasion and lets the little girl sleep beside him that night. She rests her head on her father's chest and can feel his heart...