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Monday, 21 March 2011

What is the Purpose of Life?

A very tricky question to answer.
At least that is what I think.
In this world of extreme materialism and cut throat competitive race how many have the time to stop and think about it?
What is life by the way? Grow up. Amass a lot of money. Get married. Have children. Make them grow up. Get Old and Die!
 This exactly what 99% of humans are doing today. To think about the purpose of life! O God! Why to waste time in this spiritualistic debate? What for the recluses are there? Let them think about it.

When I put forward this question before my colleagues I heard comments like
-You seem to be too much spiritualistic.
-You must be having too much free time to bother about such non sense stuff.
-Why do you worry? Enjoy till you are alive.
-Khao Pio Mauj Karo, Yehi to hai Zindagi.
These were the comments of learned individuals who regard themselves as intellectuals.I just wonder to what extent the level of intellect has gone down.

When I asked my children and their friends "what is the purpose of your life?"
 I invariable got the reply "To be an Engineer, Doctor, Corporate Executive, Entrepreneur, CA, Consultant and so on and so forth."
When I asked a few of them "Beta, Don't you think you should be a good human being first?" They laughed and said very assertively, "Uncle, Nobody will feed us if we become good persons. This is a competitive world. Survival of the fittest. We must excel in our chosen field of activity to enjoy life. You are becoming old so you are thinking of these godly sort of things."
I am amazed by the seer logic the present generation of youths put forward. But they are not to be blamed as we Indians have failed miserably in our duty to pass on our traditional cultural values to our posterity. In our consistent effort to imbibe the West in every walk of life we have completely destroyed our value system.
And the result is reflected in our day to day life.

Insensitiveness reigns supreme. We do not feel the slightest pain seeing a man dying in a pool of blood in an road accident. People dying in thousands in earth quakes , tempests, Tsunamis, floods etc do not create any ripples in our hearts. Corruption at the grass root level is taken as granted. And our extreme self-centredness prevents us from raising our voice against injustice.
We prefer to keep quiet even when injustice is meted out to our own selves.

What are we really? Eunuchs? No. Even this term has got some dignity. We do not deserve it.

Still, what is really the purpose of human life?
To answer in a single phrase, I think, it is "to be a sensitive human being"
Now I leave it to you to decide what a sensitive human being is.
But for God's sake live this life like a human  and not like an ANIMAL.



Saturday, 26 February 2011

Why Bad Things Happen to Good People?

This question was posed to me by a spiritual website. I don't know what prompted the site to raise such a hypothetical question. But certainly  it instigated something in me to create this blog. But the question is: do really bad things happen to good people? I am not very sure. To me good and bad are very relative terms. The thing which is good for me may be bad for somebody else and vice versa. Things do happen. But whether the happening is good or bad it all depends on the perception of the individual concerned. If a thing happens as per my wish or expectation then I consider it as good. But if it is the other way round I consider it as bad. And as far as I am concerned I never consider myself  to be in the category of BAD people. So whenever something happens which is against my (a good man's) wish/expectation I say a bad thing has happened to me.
In similar terms our Society brands people as good or bad depending on whether the person concerned is within the moral boundary imposed by it, whether the person adheres to the unwritten norms created by it from time to time. For example nowhere it is written that drinking alcohol will make somebody bad. But a person who drinks regularly is not considered as a good man by the society at large and is literally ostracized. Now if this man meets with an accident the society does not sympathize with him and in a sense enjoys his misfortune. But if a good person (read who does not drink) meets with a similar accident the society feels sorry for him.
Now the same happening(Accident) is  having different implications.
I am really confused whether a good thing happened to a bad person or a bad thing happened to a good person ?
To conclude since good and bad are absolutely relative terms there is no point in brooding over why bad things happen to good people. Let's live life happily without putting too much seriousness into it. Things are destined to happen and we hardly have any control over them. Let's accept things as they come and be happy.
To quote  a few line from a famous book of Dale Carnegie:
                      " O God ! Give me the serenity
                        To Accept Things as they come
                        To Change the things that I can
                        And the Wisdom to know the difference."
Any difference of opinion?  Please speak out.