An easy going attitude can be a virtue as well as a fault! Rather than being uniformly easy going in attiutude, I believe it is more favorable to know - where to go easy and where to be firm and being able to follow through with that knowledge! But what we often see is, mountains made out of molehills and molehills made out of mountains! Much of the evils in life are the result of being firm where we should have gone easy, and going easy where we should have been firm.
As another child falls into an uncapped abandoned borewell and dies(June 20), one cannot but pause and feel guilty along with the nation for having gone easy on the first offender years ago who did not follow the regulation of capping an abandoned borewell. If only the media had made it a point to do a follow up after the first such incident covered six years ago(Prince) and shown the nation not only the drama of painful circumstances but also the grimness of what happens to the offender, then the many following deaths could have been avoided. If only a punishment grim enough had really been meted out then, to create enough fear, it could have prevented such callous attitudes in serious matters as this.
As I flipped through the biography of a gangster "Dawood" who went on to be the cause behind terror in India, I came upon a passage that told me his beginnings in a small conning gang. "As they got away with little offenses they grew more and more confident that they could get away with anything in the country"! And I knew then, that its again our fault; if the soicety had made it a point to severely punish the first offence, it would have nipped crime at the bud and society would not become responsible for terror and thousands of deaths in the nation.
Sometimes forgiveness and mercy is a worse sin. As the little girl Mahi called out to her father to save her out of the borewell, his father could do nothing but wait outside helplessly for three days. The whole world joined together to pray to God the Father for the life of the girl, and still He did not intervene either. If we don't learn when a life is spared as with Prince, what do we require to learn?...A Mahi? (a name which means "Earth Goddess"...)
I have seen that when an issue repeats in our life, it means only one thing; we haven't learnt our lesson with the first. What is the lesson we are not learning in this and other issues in our country? Why are we too kind to callousness and to the likes of Kasab who go on a killing spree? In being kind to one life we are being unkind to thousands of innocent lives in future who may be suspected to be another Kasab,another Dawood, another uncapped borewell.
Are we too much of the forgiving kind? No, not really! We are merely hypocrites. If we (the common man) see one frivolous error in a man who likes to walk the straight path, we are quick to point it out. Why? It is because he is "affected" by his faults and because we enjoy his discomfort in being affected.
But we see "ourselves" in the likes of people who leave a bore well open for saving expenses; we see "ourselves" in a Dawood who in a lust of money, manhood and power showed so called "bravado", "cleverness" and "manliness" in his growth to a Don; which a "man cant help appreciating", in spite of everything it meant eventually. There is no fun in criticising and punishing "ourselves" for having saved some effort and money in capping a borewell, but yeah 'such fun' in pricking the perfectionist as a duffer and good for nothing, over say an umbrella he failed to take! We see ourselves in people who lust the world and not in people who love the good and so we pick the wrong, frivolous battles to fight!
We do have to be wise and not frivolous in choosing our battles. . But I reiterate what I wrote before....If we laze out of the first worthwhile battle, we create for us a worse and woeful war to fight someday.