Monday, September 28, 2009

Be SELFISH to Conquer the “RAVANA”

Dussehra is one of the most important Indian festivals. It is said that it symbolizes victory of good over evil and triumph of truth over deceit.

I am neither a religious person nor my concept of God matches with any mythological character. However, few of the childhood stories narrated to me from our epics indeed carry a great moral value. These stories relate to a different era when sons left their palatial comforts and heartily accepted a hard life for years to keep the word of their father, these days hotels have to give discounts so that sons are encouraged to take their parents and grand parents for comfortable outing once in a while.

Everywhere one turns, from wars, death and killing, to exploitation and greed, to corruption and misuse of power, in all the negatives we can find our folly at work. Good and evil have always existed but what has truly changed is the perception of human towards self. In those stories of our epics people took the responsibilities for their mistakes and punished their own self unlike our times when putting the blame and finding the mistakes in system culminates our war against demons of all evils. We are too consumed by reactions that we forget to respond and act. Most of us  don’t even react because somewhere in our heart they know that they are part and parcel of system that  represents evil..

Was Ram a sacrificer ? No, He was not. He is called “Maryada Pushotam” because “Maryada” (the ambit) refers more to self esteem than it does to sacrifice.  On his principles for life, honoring word of his father meant more than worldly comforts. This is high time that we begin to learn the true meaning of self and selfish. Let us be selfish, let us try our bit to eliminate the miseries of world because they bother us and not because to do so is in accordance with established code of altruism. A person who does service to humanity to gain applause or acceptance can never be called noble. Let us do it because in the night when we close our eyes to ponder over our day we see some acts that justify our reason for existence. Let us to do it for our self esteem and not under the pretext of helping humanity for shoddy altruism.

These things were very well projected by Ayn Rand in many of her books .Though, I am great admirer of her work but I feel characters of her books are too haughty to be humble, understanding and compassionate as these characters in their pursuit of excellence begin to look down on fellow men with scorn..They begin to forget that answer to one profound truth can be another truth .

In my opinion ,objectivity is a great philosophy which is based on reason and not on faith.. It is based on scientific method which accepts facts and rejects opinions. I honestly feel objectivity combined with spiritualism is a beautiful way of life. Objectivity raises our self esteem and teaches us to prepare our self to do everything for our need not under some pseudo tag of service to mankind or altruism but for the satisfaction of our need for self actualization . It teaches us that at center of all acts is conscious , subconscious and transcendentally conscious 'I , the self.', combined to this spiritualism teaches to look within and not to point fingers and denounce.

Let us recognize that everything either good or bad starts with self . so instead of blaming the world , let us do our bit whether or not we get any credit for it , let us do it because within us we feel it should be done .Let us do it with selfish motive  governed by inner motivation that for some flowery pretext of mild of human kindness  .Only better individuals and better citizen can pull us out of despair or we will continue to celebrate symbolic Dussehra midst the sorrowful shape of mankind in an age of great prosperity and knowledge equally along side sorrow and despair.

4 comments:

  1. Good point made out of the story of Dussehra. It's right, selfishness isn't a bad thing as it is thought.

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  2. Thanks Darshan , Only if everyone could be true to oneself and has set very high standards for self we will have the society that we can be proud of .Ram did not think about consequences, neither did Howard Roark... they did what was correct on their value system.They valued their values and their pride more than acceptable norms of convenience.

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  3. the only person we can change in this world is ourselves .. thats the least we can do !!

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  4. @ naveen, That is all we need to do .Imagine if everyone does that you neither need police nor laws.

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Your viewpoint will definitely give it wider perspective

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