jabdakhata

When Swami Vivekananda was wandering as a mendicant in Varanasi, he was once troubled by a group of monkeys. He started running out of fear but the monkeys chased him. Seeing this, another ascetic shouted at him, ‘Swami, turn around, face the brutes!’ Swamiji did just that and the monkeys vanished. Later, while recalling this experience Swamiji said that problems in our life are like that of these monkeys. If we run away from the problems, they will chase us and hunt us down, but if we face them bravely, we may be able to beat all odds and emerge unscathed. It is a vital lesson of life that unless we stand up and face the challenges, the challenges will multiply and will eventually destroy us. What is a vital lesson for an individual is also a lesson for a nation and for the entire world. India has repeatedly been attacked but it has not faced the brutes. Time and again for the past 60 years or so it has proved that it is a nation of cowards, non violence and tolerance are just its f

Another terror attacks strikes Mumbai. The pattern is now oft repeated – bold headlines, TV channels running for TRP and excitement, innocents losing lives, families getting shattered, politicians including the heads of the state “condemn” and request people to maintain “calm” (why don’t they just hand over a previously recorded version instead of repeating the same glib statements is something beyond my limited wisdom, and why do media attach so much importance to their repetition is also strange). Another thing that comes up repeatedly, esp. in the media is the “resilience of Mumbaikars”. Now that leads me to wonder, what is meant by resilience? Is it to suffer attacks time and again and do nothing, just go back to old business, forgetting everything – is that what is resilience? Silently suffering all corruption, bad civic infrastructure, monsoon flood – are these all part of the same resilience? To my mind, this is not resilience but far from it, it is cowardice. It is the tendenc