Through the Rough Weather

At one moment of the interview, I myself felt embarassed for asking the boy something so very touchy, that he was almost in tears. From his early childhood he had lived with his mother, after his father divorced his mother and began to live with his elder brother. He had never met his brother nor his father, until one day in the school library he happened to meet his brother, but did not know that he was his own elder brother. After putting together what he had heard from his mother, he knew that he was his own brother, now living with his father. He had the guts to tell his brother that they were related by blood.

But what he shared after this piece of information was chilling for me. His elder brother had invited him to the house where the former lived with his father. When his father asked his elder brother, who he was, it seems his elder brother told him that he was his friend. Even now, his father does not know anything about him. He lost his mother about ten years ago, and had been living at the mercy of some priests who had adopted him, and brought him up. I felt very sad for the man, whose eyes watered as he narrated bits and pieces of his life story. Even my seeming innocent questions looked very strange to him, and he struggled to answer me.

He is a fine young man, who had a lots of will power to fight against all odds to go ahead with life; he said he had taken special interest in psychology, not so much to help others, but to know about his own background, the psychological limitations he had grown with and how he could find some sort of remedy for them. This is something beautiful in him – the strong determination with which he pursued his studies and completed his undergraduation with first class, and thought of something greater for humanity, a life of commitment and dedication to the service of the wider society. I know he has many other riddles to unravel as he moves forward in life.

If I were in his situation, I wonder if I would have reached as much as he had done; embittered with life, many people attempt to find short cuts to remedy the agonizing situations; it is easy to give up hope in these situations, and luckily there had been some good-hearted priests who had helped him to recover from the loss of his only hope, his mother, who died of cancer at a time when he needed her the most. His lift support had been removed, and he would have felt that he was a lone boat in the midst of the endless sea, unable to find a way. Thank God, now he seems to be aware of where he wants to go, and how he wants to organize his life.

If there is one reason why many of the youth these days are disoriented early in life, it is because they have not seen the hardships of life, and they do not know what it means to find their own way. The families these days do not want the children to get into the waters, because they are afraid that their children might get drowned, and as a result most of them never learn swimming, and when they have to get into waters, it is too late for them to learn swimming, and that is when the fatal accidents might take place. I am happy that this young man has learned swimming through the hard way, and now he is prepared to teach other young men how to swim. And he knows he would be able to teach them better than others, because he knows the nittygritties of this new art.

Jamming Judgements

I have been told umpteen times that I am a man of strong characters, strong temperament, likes and dislikes. It would be quite hard for me to accept or reject this major complaint about me. I would not make an attempt to address this issue of strong sentiments. Honestly speaking over the years I had been spending considerable amount of time delving deep into the inner recesses of my heart; the greatest discovery that I can possibly achieve during this life on earth is unravelling some of the baffling secrets, which are even now shrouded in mystery. No Sherlock Homes will ever be able to do it; nor can any Feluda of Satyajit Ray can ever enter into the guarded Red Forts!

A man of strong characters! Is it a virtue or a vice? You might smile and say, it all depends on whom I ask. But is there an objective truth in our judgements? How much of our judgements and evaluation of persons in our society are based on objective facts? In fact, even the very term objective facts may be understood by one hundred persons in one hundred and one ways. Each of us look at an external reality on the basis of our own perceptions, or to borrow an image from psychology, on the basis of the color glasses we wear. Perhaps there is not a single day in our lives when we had even unwittingly failed to judge a person or an event. It has become our second nature. Often I feel judging is itself a necessary evil that we have come to accept and acknowledge - judge others, often erroneously and allowing ourselves to be judged.

One of the greatest tragedies that often shake the world is caused by people who take the judgement of others too seriously. For many, what others say is the gospel truth; even if they know the information to be completely false, yet they will give undue weightage to it, and undergo untold suffering and pain deep within. It doesn't cost us any money to judge a person - either positively or negatively. For quite many of us in socieyt it is one of the most favorite passtimes. We know the very moment we take the words of these people seriously, our world may begin to crumble slowly. All our dreams will be fragmented into a million pieces all within a minute! But the moot question is : Am I free to take this judgement or not! Do I have the power to reject it? Of course I have the power deep within me!

This brings us to yet another crisis moment in life: can I ever live a peaceful life without paying heed to what others say about me? Is it not too rude and impolite to reject the opinions of others? It is not! In fact it is only when I begin to ask myself if I should take or reject the judgements of others, do I truly begin to show that I am a mature person, and am serious about my relationship with others, and that I control the direction of my destiny. Often we wish others to control our lives and find it frightening to reject what a good majority in society may say, or wish us to accept as blatant truth.

At this juncture, what am I to do? the one and perhaps the only question that I may have to ask myself is this : how far is this evaluation of myself by others or the judgements going to shape my future. If we give power to these judgements, however sound they may seem, then I am sure to ruin my life; but unfortunately more than 60 per cent of the people in society may take the criticism of others literally. Today I pause for a while and think of the one or two persons who had judged me positively or negatively, or reacted to me on the basis of his/her prejudgement or prejudice. Can I overcome the consequences of these judgements? Let me over come the excessive pain or pleasure that they may cause. Let me learn to take them for what they are truly worth! That may also be the beginning of accepting myself as I truly am, and there is the way to true enlightenment!