Skip to main content

Values

That trickling sweat has more value than all words, words, words

The greatest tragedy of evolution is that when the ape descended from the tree its heart refused to evolve.  The brain evolved and continues to do so giving us better and better technology.  The heart remains primitive giving us more and more violence and crimes.

Contradictory as it may seem, the solution lies in making people more rational.  The plain truth is that our thoughts determine our feelings and behaviour.  Irrational thoughts produce irrational behaviour.  If I think that my religion is the only correct religion and my god is the only true god, I’ll go around inflicting my religion and god on others.  The solution is to question my thinking.  Is my religion the only correct one?  Is my god the only true god?  That is rational thinking. 

Take it at a still more practical level.  My worth depends on the appreciation I receive for the works I do.  This is irrational thinking.  People will love me only if I am fair and lovely.  This is irrational thinking.  I have to be a winner wherever I am and whatever I’m doing.  This is irrational thinking.  Yet most people are driven by such thinking.  Hence we have unnecessary competition, rivalry, jealousy, greed, and all the sins that pollute the Ganga endlessly. 

Hence the first thing to do is to develop rational thinking.  Challenge your thoughts rationally and you begin to see a different world.  Life changes.  Magic descends into life.  The rainbow begins to glitter behind the clouds. 

The conflict between the heart and the brain begins to melt.  That leads to integrity, the second value (the first being rational thinking).  Integrity means wholeness.  Reason and emotion are synchronised to create a symphony.  Life becomes as sweet as mellifluous music.  Plain honesty becomes the habit.  Masks vanish.  You are what you are.  You don’t have to pretend.  You don’t have to go around exercising your oratorical skills to hoodwink people to vote for you.  People will vote for you.  You don’t have to spend crores on publicity.  People see through you.  People see your integrity.  They admire you.  You are the real hero. 

Real heroism is driven by compassion. The real hero understands the situation with clarity.  Genuine understanding leads to our obligation towards fellow beings, towards the planet, towards even the stone on which we tread. 

The genuine hero is not sarcastic.  The genuine hero is not cynical.  The genuine hero does not need oratory and histrionics.  Propaganda is out.  Advertisement is redundant.  Words are not required.  Actions speak.  Action.  Action that emerges from rational thinking, integrity and compassion.  A brave new world emerges. 

My dream.  My utopia.  My contribution to IndiSpire Edition 199:

What are the 3 most important values that you would teach your child? #responsibleparent

Comments

  1. Hindi SudhaNovember 29, 2018 at 1:50 PM

    Your worth should & must depend only on what you do or what makes you feel happy & satisfied. Not on the appreciation of others for your work or something.
    Indeed I strongly agree that the Real heroism is driven by compassion.
    Anyways, thanks for sharing.
    -
    Thanks & Stay Blessed - Sheetal

    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
47 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 4

The footpath between Park Avenue and Subhash Bose Park The Park Avenue in Ernakulam is flanked by gigantic rain trees with their branches arching over the road like a cathedral of green. They were not so domineering four decades ago when I used to walk beneath their growing canopies. The Park Avenue with its charming, enormous trees has a history too. King Rama Varma of Kochi ordered trees to be planted on either side of the road and make it look like a European avenue. He also developed a park beside it. The park was named after him, though today it is divided into two parts, with one part named after Subhash Chandra Bose and the other after Indira Gandhi. We can never say how long Indira Gandhi’s name will remain there. Even Sardar Patel, whom the right wing apparently admires, was ousted from the world’s biggest cricket stadium which was renamed Narendra Modi Stadium by Narendra Modi.   Renaming places and roads and institutions is one of the favourite pastimes of the pres...
11 comments
Read more

Good Life

I introduced A C Grayling’s book, The God Argument , in two earlier posts.   This post presents the professor’s views on good life.   Grayling posits seven characteristics of a good life.   The first characteristic is that a good life is a meaningful one.   Meaning is “a set of values and their associated goals that give a life its shape and direction.”   Having children to look after or achieving success in one’s profession or any other very ordinary goal can make life meaningful.   But Grayling says quoting Oscar Wilde that everyone’s map of the world should have a Utopia on it.   That is, everyone should dream of a better world and strive to materialise that dream, if life is to be truly meaningful.   Ability to form relationships with other people is the second characteristic.   Intimacy with at least one other person is an important feature of a meaningful life.   “Good relationships make better people,” says G...
21 comments
Read more

Re-exploring the Past: The Fort Kochi Chapters – 1

Inside St Francis Church, Fort Kochi Moraes Zogoiby (Moor), the narrator-protagonist of Salman Rushdie’s iconic novel The Moor’s Last Sigh , carries in his genes a richly variegated lineage. His mother, Aurora da Gama, belongs to the da Gama family of Kochi, who claim descent from none less than Vasco da Gama, the historical Portuguese Catholic explorer. Abraham Zogoiby, his father, is a Jew whose family originally belonged to Spain from where they were expelled by the Catholic Inquisition. Kochi welcomed all the Jews who arrived there in 1492 from Spain. Vasco da Gama landed on the Malabar coast of Kerala in 1498. Today’s Fort Kochi carries the history of all those arrivals and subsequent mingling of history and miscegenation of races. Kochi’s history is intertwined with that of the Portuguese, the Dutch, the British, the Arbas, the Jews, and the Chinese. No culture is a sacrosanct monolith that can remain untouched by other cultures that keep coming in from all over the world. ...
7 comments
Read more

Yesterday

With students of Carmel Margaret, are you grieving / Over Goldengrove unleaving…? It was one of my first days in the eleventh class of Carmel Public School in Kerala, the last school of my teaching career. One girl, whose name was not Margaret, was in the class looking extremely melancholy. I had noticed her for a few days. I didn’t know how to put the matter over to her. I had already told the students that a smiling face was a rule in the English class. Since Margaret didn’t comply, I chose to drag Hopkins in. I replaced the name of Margaret with the girl’s actual name, however, when I quoted the lines. Margaret is a little girl in the Hopkins poem. Looking at autumn’s falling leaves, Margaret is saddened by the fact of life’s inevitable degeneration. The leaves have to turn yellow and eventually fall. And decay. The poet tells her that she has no choice but accept certain inevitabilities of life. Sorrow is our legacy, Margaret , I said to Margaret’s alter ego in my class. Let...
36 comments
Read more