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.
11 comments:
Damn good analogy... i jst loved d analogies..
My perception: Very complex thing for a common man to understand dis thing.. to resolve d mindset is a different issue to address... :D
To do something in a right way needs an explicit realization of wat is "wrong" going on.. Until n unless dey realize it, dey won't get to know d words u mentioned.. :D
bravo Jerls for coming up with such a sensetastic thought and analogy.. ^.^
Your post reminded me of what Jesus said: "Before you criticize the mote in your brother's eye, take the plank out of yours." We do tend to "pick" on the wrong people, don't we? And, I'm with you - if the punishments are consistent in light of the crime, I believe so much harm and destruction could be avoided.
My heart goes out to that little girl and her family . . .
Blessings to you!
i personally feel that more than any thing its our "Chalta Hai" attitude....and unless that changes things can't be improved, i agree here totally that if these culprits are fixed on an early stage by the rule of law then that can be a lesson for others butttttt unfortunately that is not happening and things are getting worse from bad....:(
a well written thought provoking post....!!
I find this to hold true in every area of our lives. In raising the second batch of children as I am now. I choose my battle a little more carefully and do a much better job of enforcing for the good.
Being soft has in many ways helped to destroy my own children's ability to choose the right way. I won't make that mistake again with their children.
There is so much that I watch on the news, or see in my daily life that I wonder how it would have been different if the original issues, or problems, would have been solved in the first place. This was a great post, one that definitely leaves you thinking about everything that is going on in the world today.
Brilliant brilliant just brilliant, the way u explained whole damn one line wid d help of live examples deserves an appluad.
Keep coming up wid such g8 stuff jerly! I learnt something here today, I too feel we indians r not only hypocrites but lazy as well to come up speak up n definetely take stands in life. We lyws prefer an easy way out and prefer to wait....huhh!
N our media more than doing anything good is just on bunch of nonsesne only...hardly i cn hook to any news channel fr a few mins..no sensible news...only nuisance going on and no role fr findin out ny solution.
We definitely need to choose our own battles. Bringing up children is such a huge responsibility that raising them too soft can actually make matters worse.
What you wrote is very significant and have to be taken seriously.
I do agree that we should not lay options on such cases. No three strikes.
It wouldn't have gone as far as that if the government or those in position to do that had done something in the first place.
Take action...please!
Thanks Monu, Mary, Martha, Melissa, Mani, Jan, Anne and Irffanuddin. "Chalta Hai" or easy going, is what it is, and it is for the wrong things. People do not say :"Chalta hai" where a matter does no harm to anybody else, but where it can harm others in many ways they say "Chalta Hai". We have think of the larger good in any of our attitudes to events
Sad but very true!!!
Jerly you wrote a wonderful post amplifying highlighting the laid back and lax attitude which is responsible for most ills! We would need at least a 100 episodes by likes of Aamir Khan to bring them to surface and still the list would be incomplete:(
Post a Comment