An Open Letter to Mahavir Karna

Dear Mahavir Karna,

What a life you had to live! An entire adult dream nourished only to destroy a worthy man, an inadvertent rival in glory notwithstanding. Your anger dates back to society’s refusal to let you think out of box. They wanted you to be a charioteer, and you will be nothing less than the greatest archer. Even the warrior brahmin would not take you as a disciple. You however went on to be trained by his guru Parshuram. There also he took away your freedom to use your knowledge. Undaunted, you challenged Arjun in the family testing grounds; but the by now familiar and overused ‘sutaputra’ adage denied you the chance, and seeing in you a firebrand rival of Arjun, Duryodhana befriended you. You were bought over with a paltry crown, like a Kalashnikov, lock stock and barrel. You now became a prisoner of your own ambition. The best years of your life you were in bondage created by yourself. 

Fine, you were grateful to him. But was it a part of your gratefulness that you participated in the Draupadi undressing show? Far from stopping him from the barbarous behaviour, you suggested it to him! Did it fall in place of even the Sutaputra calling, which you hated? Would any other sutaputra have done what you did? Was it worthy of even a sutaputra? Yet you continued playing the grateful card! D gave you a little principality, and called you a king. And you thought that was a fair enough price for your archery by which you could have subdued the whole world. What a poor self-esteem! Would any fool agree to sell oneself so cheaply to a greater fool? And you were literally a Mahavir.

Then you participated in D’s stealing of cows! I cannot conceive how a Mahavir would feel worth it stealing cows, no matter they were a king’s cows, no matter how grateful he may be to a thief-friend.  Why did you go to Panchala to win Draupadi? Your long experience with being a sutaputra taught you no lessons? Did you ever think the proud Drupada would accept you as a son in law? Or did you want to destroy the suta-kshatriya divide you hated since your birth? Did you want to establish a classless society where only the powerful will rule? Then why did you meekly submit to Draupadi when she quoted the divide? I am afraid even if you had won her you would not have a second thought in giving her away to D if he felt interested. And if a Brahmin won her, why didn’t you leave it at that? What was the need to show your ire to a rightful choice of the princess? Didn’t Arjuna show valour beyond even your dearest friend? Then why didn’t you allow the powerful take the prize? You fought all your life for adhikar of the deserving, didn’t you? Then why did you string your bow when a brahmin deserved the princess by his adhikar of power? If you didn’t accept that a sutaputra cannot wield arms, how did you accept a brahmin cannot win a kshatriya princess? Aha, you wanted to win her for your friend! Was that your grateful currency too to buy a bride for him after he failed to fulfill the very basic requirement, and you thought a princess born of fire would accept a marriage in proxy? Weren’t you divided against yourself? Dear Mahavir, you were sliding down your status, strangely blinded by the dark prince. 

What an admirable piece of work is man! How infinite in faculty, yet how insufficient in reasoning!  When it came to deciding right action you thought in your mind which was filled with anger, and had no place for your heart which was a very noble piece. Conversely, when it came to action grandfather Bheesma thought with his heart which was filled with love for his father, and put his mind away which could have reasoned out. He forgot the spirit of words in his devotion to the form of words. He remembered his affectionate father, but did not remember the king in him. The promise he made was meant for his father, but it also covered the king. He advised Dhritarastra later to be a king first, then a father. When he pronounced his own pledge, was he doing it for the father, or the king? Isn’t the dharma of a son to protect the dharma of the father, ensure the stability of the kingdom? Did he do that?  He confused the king-father with the father-king, and caught in his own irrational words, was led to the Great War helplessly. He could not swallow his pride and allowed the whole country to be swallowed by the cataclysmic war. He was born to rule, but chose to serve, and what a master to serve! Surely that extension wasn’t necessary. Isn’t it what the Vedanta says as the greatest illusion man suffers? Amrutasya putra, a child of eternity, living as anrutasya putra, a child of lie, willingly. Tragedies are not scripted in heaven; they are written and enacted by the actors themselves. 

And what you did? You too were born to rule, but delighted in serving the devil! Your heart knew D was in the wrong, but you too could not swallow your precious pride, and continued to support him. You even did something worse. You took care to see that the fire in D did not die down. Both of you lived half lives, driving a wedge between a thinking mind and a feeling heart. There was no balance in your lives. Therefore, though both of you were noble as angel, both of you turned out to be great threats to the stability of the world. You had to be eliminated for public good and justice, but of course at a huge price. Both of you stuck to your rights, and forgot your responsibilities. Both of you had acquired great powers, but both of you forgot that if power is not used for the protection of society, it will corrupt, and when absolute power corrupts, it can destroy absolutely.

I rate you greater than even Bheesma and Drona. The Grandfather had the protection of a boon. But you had deliberately relinquished your divine protection, yet remained unvanquished in a fair fight. Two or three times Krishna had to rescue Arjun from your deadly missiles. Arjun fought the war with revenge in his heart. Even that he wanted to relinquish for the good of the society, but Krishna convinced him he needed that revenge for the good of the society. Krishna tried to convince you about your misplaced loyalty, but you would not. Wasn’t Arjuna justified after what you did to his wife in public? What justification did you have to join hands with the evil prince? When you stood before him you knew that you were face to face with your little brother. Yet you fought to kill. You were a living contradiction, and you knew it. The Grandfather was a living regret, and he too knew it. His knowledge allowed him to be saddled with a promise that he would not kill the five brothers, and your knowledge saddled you with a promise that you will kill none of them except Arjun. You chose to destroy the ablest of them probably because you thought that two supremely capable persons couldn’t coexist. Professional jealousy? But wasn’t it mean for a Mahavir of your status? After the Grandfather’s fall the five brothers reconciled with him, and would have gladly done so with you, their bravest eldest, but you had no time to create that balance in your life, for you had lived too long with the venom of D. 

And what about the homicide of Abhimanyu? By no stretch of imagination I am prepared to condone your participation in the barbarous hunt. That stripling of a genius wasn’t ever even the remotest part of your revenge. It was just like your participation in the Draupadi undressing performance. Both were wild hunts, unrestrained by any civilized values. And imagine you were an enthusiastic perpetrator at both sites! Dear Mahavir, what was the matter with you? Why did you stifle your noble heart? Your cruelty towards yourself was one of the greatest and saddest in the history of humanity. You are the tragic prince Hamlet in Mahabharata. 

Let us suppose for a moment you had killed Arjun and won the war for the Kauravas, more than 90% of whom had already been killed. The other pandavas would be captured and executed by D, and your great friend would be the king. Now would that be a very salubrious situation for you? Would you have felt fulfilled? Till now you lived on the dream of killing Arjun, and be accepted as the greatest by the world. After Arjuna’s death you could relax on your ‘greatest’ throne. But that old warrior Drona will not accept you. Kunti, whom you have already recognised as your biological mother, would be dead. Krishna would have failed. Gandhari might force Dhritarastra to go on vanaprastha. D would be fully unrestrained in his evil adventures, and you would be a mute witness, or you would also join him? Could you count how many Draupadis would be undressed all over his kingdom? You would be a Mahavir living posthumously. 

You believed in the dignity of the individual, didn’t you? They called you a sutaputra, and denied you chance to fight a kshatriya. Wasn’t it ironical that you were bought over by a kshatriya to fight another kshatriya as his instrument? It was your battle, but D hijacked it for his good, and you submitted meekly. Was it in keeping with your idea of dignity? You not only digested this insult, you upheld and defended it all your life as a great honour! What a Mahavir you were! You could have single handed won a kingdom, and created another Hastinapur to challenge Arjun. Even Bheesma and Drona would have been powerless against your divine protection. I always wonder why this didn’t occur to you.

We will now look at your life from a different angle. It was a struggle between society and individual. Can the selfish dividing caste lines be permitted to undermine a genius, stop a worthy achiever from manifesting his potential? You were born with divine grace, and the blind social conventions tried to contravene grace itself! So you were up in arms against it. Your anger was not misplaced, your desire to rewrite the conventions was not undesirable, but you practised deceit to achieve that. You made your guru Parshuram believe that you were from a brahmin family. And when he discovered the lie he put a permanent bind on your ability to use your full potential. You wanted to acquire ultimate power from a Brahmin to use against the kshatriyas to remedy the injustice done to a sutaputra. If it was right for you, practising a little adharma to punish another adharma, why did you cry foul when Arjun killed the Grandfather with his consent? You probably wanted a society where power is the ultimate language. Wasn’t it a greater and more dangerous divide? If wild power is allowed to rule, it will turn the whole world into a wilderness. All three of you, the Grandfather, the Guru, and you were the ultimate warriors of your times. Did any good accrue to the society from any one of you? You wanted to remove the flaw in the society, didn’t you? But you were flawed yourself! Physician, heal thyself. If you come back, you will notice that Hitler of our times tried to execute the same principle, rewriting history by gathering the powers of history into his hands. He wanted to destroy the Jews because they didn’t fit into his plan.

I can’t of course forget Kunti’s role in all that happened to you. The poor princess paid the price for her undue curiosity to test the power of mantra, and for being part of a rigid aristocracy. She was gentle as a flower, a lonely melody in a wild jungle; could she fight the all powerful aristocracy? The rest of her life was a living hell. A moment’s lapse cost her her entire life. She was the saddest and noblest of all women in the epic story. But you never forgave her. Her loving heart always yearned to hug you, feel proud to call you her eldest son, and cursed herself every day for abandoning you. She was a sacrifice in the altar of the convention of society. If you thought you were a sacrifice at the altar of a blind society, Kunti too was. You were a man, a warrior, so you could rebel against it. But Kunti? She was a woman, a gentle creature, obedient to the convention.  And when you participated in the Draupadi drama, didn’t you support what you said you hated, the irrationality of a male-dominated society? At an earlier era the daughter of Janaka had been another. She at least knew that Sri Rama intensely shared her agony, but Kunti had no one to share. She suffered alone, and heroically. She was another tragic character, intensely human, but a prey to human predicament.

Tragic heroes, critics say, are men and women who live with intensity, are endowed with great abilities, but are basically flawed. They occupy very high positions in the society; are very sensitive, sometimes forbiddingly sensitive; are passionate about their actions; are very honest and incapable of double dealing, but all these gifts are mismanaged.  They are often impulsive, self-contradictory, imbalanced, or intolerant. One will love them, admire them, but pity them too. You were no doubt a rare piece of humanity with great valour, charity, courage, excellence in your chosen field, respect for values, transparent in your actions, passionate about what you thought was your dharma, but you had a single overriding objective of destroying Arjun, though he personally had done no wrong to you. Given a choice, he would probably have accepted your challenge to him in the family test, but he too was the prisoner of a powerful tradition. The difference was he had accepted it because he was a part of it, but you did not because you were outside of it. However, you had no reasons to pick up that noble man to avenge the social norms. The Pandavas would have accepted you as their eldest, and fallen at your feet at any stage of the war, had Kunti revealed the truth, but you would not accept them even if you knew it before the battle plans were drawn! Your expensive pride as the greatest, and your unreasonable rejection of mother Kunti got the better of you, and led you to unite with the devil himself! That was your nemesis. You burned your boat behind you, and signed your own undoing with Mephistopheles! You are a tragic hero in a cosmic play. The likes of you always strike awe, but rarely light up the stage. I love you, respect you, but feel sorry for you too, dear Mahavir Karna. Forgive me for saying a few hard words about you, but you shall always stand tall as an emblem of the human predicament in this great story of life, stuffed with endless variety.

a fan of yours

                                   

An Autobiography of God

                                            

I don’t remember when I was not.

I don’t either remember when things were not.

They have always been my expression, my exploration.

Sometimes, in a philosophical mood, I wonder am I two, three, four or one?

But soon I give up the meaningless effort, for I can see the differences exist, yet they do not.

When those things, my many faces, look at me in asking eyes, I want to tell them what I feel, but it is so difficult to make them understand. Nevertheless, I love the game. I make them ask questions, pretend answering them, yet I know full well it’s just a game. I am not a cheat. I mean what I do. I do what I mean; ah, that’s the more difficult part.

Sometimes I tell myself, the game is no more fun, and so let me wind it up.

But I don’t. It would feel like singing a joyful song in silence! The song would jump out of me by itself, and I love to see the fireworks. Though I know I am in every cadence, every vibrating sound, experiencing it is exhilarating.  That keeps me one in all.

I love them all, though I can’t decipher what is the difference between loving and not loving. They are virtually not two stages, yet they are two. When I think, I think in them as well; when I love, I give and receive it too. The number game is a game too, at times exciting, at times dull and uninteresting. Yet I always find something to go on.

Those things, out there, animals and humans, hills, brooks, birds, trees, the stars and the humble grass, aren’t they lovely things? I would watch them tirelessly, humming to myself only one line ‘I love you’ in various moods and melodies. I only wish they reciprocate more often than not. But when they don’t, my song becomes more and more powerful, and I like that. One part of me yearns for other parts, though there is hardly any distance between them. They think their being there is rather vague, undefined, accidental and confusing. Well, perhaps it appears so when they don’t look at me. That gives me a chance to do something for them to notice me, and hear my song.  

What do I do exactly? Well, it depends on how much distance they see. At times I work them up so much that they change their shapes rapidly, as in a war. Sometimes it is a drawn out disharmony in which the confusion builds up slowly but increasingly, for a big shake. When they are threatened by complete breakdown, they call out loud ‘is there anyone out there?’  Then I pick up my flute, and the flute does the rest to bring calm into the storm. The flute is a wonderful tool. I love to use it whenever I want to make myself heard.

Sometimes I would leave the game in their hands to see how they umpire it. There are always some who can hear the flute even in a storm. They are a little bit closer to me. When the game goes wild, they blow whistles, show yellow card to someone, and green to another, but on the whole bring down the din that they can hear the flute. Then the character of the game alters.

But I have a problem.

I would like them to respond to me as I respond to them. I would like them to feel they are part of me as I feel they are part of me. I would like them appreciate the beauty I have created for them out of myself, and understand that if they hurt anything, I am hurt. When I sing a song I would like them to join it and sing with me. When I smile from a flower, I would like them to smile at it; when I come down in raindrops and the ears of corn bend in ecstasy, I would like them to drench in the sweetness of it and hug the stalks of corn; when I groan in a lonely soul, I would like them to hear me groan and envelop me with empathy. Though all this is my game plan to make it feel real, the spirit hardly picks up.

I fail to understand why a part of me is so unlike me!

That is it. Then I change my game plan. I go and live among them, my own parts, with the apparent limitations they have. They of course notice the difference, and crowd around me for different purposes. In my eagerness I even whisper to them my reality, and assure them, all my parts, we are virtually one and same. They hear me, but walk away as if they heard nothing! I take upon myself their self-created pains, suffering and frustrations just to make them see the obvious, all these symptoms point towards only one cause: their denial to feel one with me. I don’t know why, they are not quite impressed. Probably they think, what they know cannot be denied, and what they don’t is suspect.

But something far stranger than I ever expected can happen. Some of them, my own parts, tell me in no uncertain terms that I am not welcome among them! They call me an intruder, and a nuisance. Then they hang me on a cross, or give me poison to drink, or put a bullet in my heart! For me it appears very funny, and I oblige them willingly. However, I don’t oblige always. I have to put good sense into them. So if that is possible by a couple of hits, I do that. One of the biggest such things I engineered was the Mahabharata war. But even then they failed to see their ignorance and my compassion. But when some of them can see through my game, and plead to come back with me, I am greatly pleased. I always have my compensations.

I am quite amused and amazed at my own realization. When I separate a part of myself from myself, for the fun of exploring myself, I unconsciously also create pain and suffering! They are however meant to act as intensifiers. When I create diversities, I invest them with diverse inclinations, and the freedom to follow them. Their new found freedom gives them diverse identities. That makes them develop and live at cross purposes, looking away from me. All this happens under my eyes, and I don’t prevent it.

Why don’t I prevent it? Ah, how can I prevent myself from being myself? However unwelcome it may be, they are my parts, spontaneous projections of my love, and Love is essentially freedom. Love is my nature. Being free, love does not impose itself on anyone, it would rather be hurt than cause any hurt. I don’t remember how often I have been hurt; I don’t remember too those many exceptional moments which healed me too. I take it in my stride, and go out again and again to meet them, the confused mass of myself. How is this confusion created? Do I create it? No, I don’t; I always send out of myself pure joy, pure light. How does joy and light turn into confusion and darkness?

They call me God! What does that mean? Something powerful? Something that gives them whatever they ask for? Something that turns the storm away? … Well, I don’t care. They give me a hat, I wear it until someone else comes and takes it away. They even give me a crown of thorns, and entertain themselves. Some even call me an apparition, and dismiss me as good riddance. I see the underlying irony, and have a hearty laugh. But strange, the stronger the irony, the closer I go to them. They are after all my parts. I am always around them, caressing them with the gentle fingers of wind, hugging them with the strong arms of light, patting them to slumber with the magic of night, tickling them with the dreams of death – with the single purpose that they recognise the whole. They choose not to, and prefer to be where they are, what they are, mistaken identities! When their willing ignorance overtakes them, they call out for my interference forgetting that all the time they are in my embrace! Sometimes I laugh at this incongruity; sometimes I pity them, but in the limitless expanse of my omnipresence, I feel lonely. I guess all of them out there feel terribly lonely too, and are scared to amend it.

True, there isn’t a place where I am not, there isn’t a thing I touch not, there isn’t a knowing I know not, but all this all-pervasiveness isn’t interesting at all. I want to play some game, the game of unknowing, of being in blindfold, of hiding and seeking, to put some life into the lifeless eternity. I can’t remain passive, asleep, doing nothing. But doing builds up a multilevel theatre. Being is lost in becoming until becoming gathers itself up in the being. This keeps the theatre buzzing with activity, and I like that. Being is me, becoming is me, and in the tangle of being-becoming I enjoy losing myself, and finding myself. The child runs away from her mother, stands by the side of the bed, covers her eyes with her tiny palms, and thinks mother can’t find her! The mother too stands a few steps away from the bed with the child in full view, and wonders loudly where her dear child is, until the child uncovers her eyes in disgust of not being found out! Then the mother and child hug each other, and dance a few steps in the joy of dissolution of the pretence! What a game, and I love it.

Thus, I love to cry, and then comfort myself; I love to sing, and then appreciate myself; I write the script, and love to play different roles, both the protagonist, and the antagonist. I sometimes wonder, is it honesty? If I write each dialogue, and make them recite it, haven’t I taken away their freedom? Then how can I claim love is freedom? Oh no, I provide a lot of freedom for the characters. I allow them to choose the plot. Within the plot, in order to keep it logical, real and unified, I help them perform to a result. I don’t want the performance to be aimless, and ambiguous. Within the performance I allow opportunities for sudden twists and turns. Once the character chooses a certain line of action, my dialogues for that situation takes effect. In fact every time they exercise a choice, the rules and the suitable dialogues for the situation come into operation. They have no freedom to play with that, no one can break up the unity between the choice, the consequent action, dialogues and the outcome. So, I am quite fair and honest. I have to be just and reasonable with myself.

I revel in diversity, because the whole operation is a self-exploration, for the whole as well as for the parts. The parts must find their whole, and the whole justify itself in the parts. It is like a piece of painting in which each pigment of colour carries the message of the entire picture. It’s like a family tree in which each member carries some signature of the pedigree. It’s like a little bar that goes up into the sky and bursts into a million stars of different hues. The bar would love to be many, though the many carry the same seed.   

I love to ask questions to myself, that keeps me busy. I ask myself, okay, I love to be many; but why can’t the many be just like each other? That would save me a lot of running around. I am like someone who owns a lot of property, in fact he does not know how much land he has, how much money he has, how many flocks he has. One day he goes out to explore his own wealth, to count the sacks of coins stacked in his many stores, and the many flocks grazing in his own fields. Then he is amazed at his own wealth, and decides to distribute them to others. He sets one up as a smith, another as a potter, a third as a grower of grains, a fourth a builder, another a shepherd, a thinker, a poet, a musician – all with a part of his wealth. Then he goes to a potter, and picks up a pot; goes to a smith, picks up a shining stick; goes to a grower of grains, and tastes the bread he has made for him; goes to a builder who has made a lovely little cottage for him by the side of a dancing brook; then he goes to a musician who plays an enthralling raga in his flute he has made out of a piece of hollow bamboo. He feels fulfilled, his heart bursts with joy and happiness, which he did not know earlier, and distributes his joy  and happiness again among all of them. The wealthy man has now homes everywhere. He sits back in a garden chair and thanks the moment he decided to create so many faces of his wealth he wasn’t aware he had.

I had another question for myself. If I distributed so much joy and happiness among all of them, my diverse parts, what happened to it all? Why do I have to go out often to remind them what I gave them? Ah, the answer is quite simple. All those who received my gifts, in fact I took all care to see that I don’t leave out any, started installing the gifts in their homes as decorations! Wealth is meant to be invested and multiplied to keep it growing and active. But they did not invest my gifts, and gradually forgot them in the dark corners of their homes. Some of them even took a broomstick, and cleaned up the cluttered spaces. Then the pots lost their beauty, the sticks their shine, the bread its taste, the shepherd lost his flock, and the musician forgot how to make a flute, all because they did not invest my gifts. 

But I don’t do that. I invest myself more and more in love, in truth, in beauty, in peace, in compassion, and periodically go out distributing the dividends. They accept the gifts, most of them, but very few understand the value of reinvestment. Others go home and flush them down the drain! I want to see all of them wealthy, and happy, but sadly most of them choose to remain poor! That means more work for me. I can’t give them up, for all of them belong to me; I cannot wind up the game, for then I have to start it all over again, only to witness a repeat performance! Between my joy of giving, and sadness of watching a colossal disuse of my gifts, I live an enviable eternity to eternity. I can’t afford to be tired, seek a holiday to doze off, feel slighted, or get angry, because I play the game with myself. One cannot get rid of a part of himself, only heal them. That’s what I am forever busy doing.

This is only a very small part of my autobiography. Now a days I am too busy to continue with it.

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Dawn At Your Doorstep 2

The other day I stumbled upon a YouTube video in which a young man was tying the shoelace of an old customer because he could not bend to help himself. This happened in a mall where the young man worked and discovered that the old man could not bend to fix his shoes. So he stopped near him, sat on his heels, tied his shoelaces, stood up with a big smile and helped him push his cart some distance. This video created a sensation among the viewers. They thought it an unusual, though a welcome gesture.

This created mixed response in me, both hope and despair. I despaired that such a natural human gesture should evoke surprise in any person. Extending a helping hand to someone who needs it should be a perfectly obvious and natural reaction. To consider it as unusual suggests how far we have strayed from the very basic qualities of being human. But all is not lost. Though people were surprised, no one thought it unwelcome, in fact all of them liked it. This shows that man is still capable of appreciating what is noble, and beautiful.

I got another proof of this inherent goodness embedded in the heart of man. In another YouTube video shot in the Stirling station, Perth, Australia a couple of weeks ago, I noticed a very heart-warming scene. A commuter slipped and fell while climbing into the train. One of his legs got trapped between the platform and the train, and it could not be extracted. Then most of the commuters got down from the train, pushed and tilted the compartment until the person imprisoned between the train and the platform was released.

Can you doubt the essential goodness of the human heart?

I was witness to another incident, both ugly and beautiful. I was travelling in a train which stopped for a brief few minutes at Secunderabad railway station. People scrambled to get down and get up. There was a great push near the door, and an old man fell down on the platform while alighting. He was trying to get up on his wobbling legs not to be crushed in the crowd. But he was falling down again and again. I was watching all this from a neighbouring window. No one even noticed him lying there. They were either climbing over him, or avoiding him. Suddenly my heart jumped in delight! A couple of teen age boys, one of them a tea carrier, and the other a shoe-polisher, stopped there, picked up the fallen man, made way in the crowd for him, took him to a nearby bench, put him there. The old man was panting and blessing them for saving him from being crushed to death. The tea-vender offered him a cup of tea, and left. The shoe-polish boy was sitting with him when our train started moving.

 I was very sad and happy at the same time. Why is it that people who are educated, who enjoy the gifts of life, are so much less human than a tea vender and a shoe-polisher in their teens? Why does our billion-dollar education system fail to teach us natural piety, and spontaneous humanity? Yet all is not lost if we see even in a tea vender and a shoe-polisher the light of a new dawn.

Is it an overstatement to say that Love all and serve all is the new mantra of salvation? It is the most human aspect of a human being, which is also divine. Is it an understatement to insist First be human before striving towards Divinity? Didn’t we witness the highest human qualities of love, compassion, and empathy and the divine qualities of omnipresence and omnipotence inhering in Swami? They were not like the skin and the shirt, but like a honeyed drink, both enriching each other. He wore them as a child wears his smile, so effortlessly, so unconsciously. He always  insisted that we look within, and manifest the human excellences embedded in our hearts and minds. Swami always pointed out that wisdom is not imported from outside; it is an awakening from inside. It is to awaken that which is waiting within us all the time to manifest itself. Kindness, love, unselfishness, empathy were never dead. Fear, hate, selfishness, greed have covered them. Just as single acts of cruelty and baseness hurts the human psyche, single acts of kindness and empathy lifts the human psyche. Swami wanted us to multiply acts that connect us to our neighbours and environment. Isn’t it re establishing Dharma, or right living? 

The tea seller and the shoe polisher at the Secunderabad station, the sales boy in the mall and the people at the Stirling station, and millions elsewhere performing little acts of spontaneous goodness demonstrate how we can upgrade our consciousness in our natural journey to Divinity. 

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