Return with gladness Good for Evil done.

Following is a Gujarati stanza, which the Mahatma made an ideal. It is too highly moral and needs the greatest of ethics and conscience to actually practice. But isn't that what should be inspiring for us to actually take up the challenge, to be those few mortals who can indeed go on to return Good for Evil done to us.

Today love has been superseded by hatred and beauty has been supplanted by hideousness.

We don't hesitate to kill, cheat, usurp that which is not ours, hurt, be callous to those around us who need help; we are haughty and admonish a person for a mistake of theirs, a mistake we very well know we could also commit, or were fortunate enough to not be part of.

We cant forgive. We cant stand a glaring eye that may hurt our self-indulgent ego. We are tenacious even when we know we are wrong; We don't want to change or give up, for it was someone else who pointed out our mistake and it would belittle our ego if we relinquish our claim of having never done anything wrong! We cant apologize.


Though we don't know ourselves well enough to get life going on smoothly, we are armed with enough cliche and tedious detail of the philosophy of right and wrong, of logistics and prudence, to take up the role of an uncalled Sophist; another fallout of our all powerful ego.


We don't learn from history or from our mistakes, well one has got to first admit that he ever went wrong to ever be capable of learning from it!

We cant understand love. We often weigh the benefits or the losses that come with a relationship. We call that which is least cumbersome and most convenient as a successful relationship. Love once was, when we could stand by some one whom we loved, for the person they were and when we could believe that our love would eventually make them the person of our dreams, when we knew their strength and weakness and worked to build them on their strengths. 

There was a time when people lived by their words! When one would not mind forfeiting even his life for the sake of his word. It was easier to erase oneself than to forget one's promise. But now we can vacillate from our words, can betray another and live like nothing even slightly aberrant happened. Conscience to us means conceit.

We can never help another, for all we need is to satiate ourselves with the sordid pleasures that please us. We can, if we need to have something that is important to us, even destroy our most loved one for it. Ever wondered how parents go without food for their children if in a given day food was not sufficient at home; hunger being the most intolerable and quintessential need of man? We are too busy to take time to think or know who we are or what we really want from life. We are so much in a hurry, to keep up with the pace of the futile standards of today's lifestyle, that we measure our happiness and success on our materialistic possessions and the ignoble desire to be visible or admired in the hopeless crowd. If the desire to possess endlessly was not bad enough, we are manipulative enough to portray an ostensible misery and conceal when our possessions need to be shared and obtrusively flaunt them if in excess.

We do not believe that life ends. When others die, we call it fate. We go on accumulating, trying to have only the best even if it means to get rid of people who were reasons for us reaching the pedestal we scaled. 

We consider humans the most significant of all life and can be haughty enough to kill every other life form indiscriminately, which to our 'superior' intellect mean only commodities. We don't feel kindness towards other animals and their lives, and can be derisive and conceited when taking their lives or treating them with disgust. 

We are in a rush to be the 'best'. Best in the eyes of everyone else. We can go any extent to be the best, to have our name amongst achievers of high order, it does not matter if we are best by our own efforts or through manipulation and deceit or even fortuity. We can easily own that which we did not work for and even be proud of it. We no longer believe in earning our bread, we just need bread to live, even if it means to snatch it from the mouths of another or have someone else make it for us. 

Nevertheless there is hope. We can change. For the better. If in our struggle to better ourselves however, if we lose humility, we cannot stand another person who seemingly has a few characteristics we even supposedly 'corrected' in ourselves a while ago! Let that not be the case. True enlightenment is only when we can be an example from what we have been shown and not just being a novice philosopher with no real constraints on our emotions or senses. Equanimity is the highest moral ground a man can have post enlightenment, but let it not be confused with stodginess or cowardice!

Lets start everyday like it gave us a new opportunity to be a better human being than that we were a day ago! Until then, when we can make the desire to be good and do good dangerously contagious!


And the day when we all feel that we can return with gladness Good for Evil done, there wont be any evil left to be done!

So the stanza finally...

For a bowl of water give a goodly meal;
For a kindly greeting bow thou down with zeal;
For a simple penny pay thou back with gold;
If thy life be rescued, life do not withhold.
Thus the words and actions of the wise regard;
Every little service tenfold they reward.
But the truly noble know all men as one,
And return with gladness good for evil done.

-Jesh
10 Sep 2009