The biggest casualty in Life is trust. And all the problems
in the world are because of a trust deficit.
Look at the way we
have been brought up. In a real world, with crime, terror, deceit and
falsehood, we bring up our children pretty much the same way as we have been.
We insist that they don’t speak to strangers, don’t accept eatables from them
and don’t leave school unless one of us, parents, picks them up. In our zeal to
protect and ensure safety of our children, we are, unwittingly, teaching them
not to trust fellow human beings. Nothing wrong with that. The problem arises
when, after we, or our children, reach adulthood, we don’t ‘unlearn’ what we
have learnt to do__more as a necessity than as a choice. Resultantly, we end up
harboring and breeding mistrust all our lives.
A few weeks ago, a
friend, a very accomplished businessman who is worth several million dollars,
advised me thus: “You should not trust three kinds of people. Don’t trust the
three Ms: Muslims, Mangaloreans and Marwaris (the second being a place in
Northern Karnataka, and the last being a businessman community from North
India).” I was shocked. Here was an educated, successful man, wealthy and
civilized, and yet having such primitive, conservative misgivings? But he isn’t
the only one with such views. To someone else, it could be three other Ms:
Malayalis (people from Kerala), Madrasis (all North Indians call anyone South
Indian, a Madrasi) or Mongolians! Or it could be the three Hs: Hindus,
Hungarians and the Hungry. Or the 10 Bs and so on. This is endless. And
Meaningless. My response to my friend therefore was: “Well you can definitely
trust one M: ‘Manithan’!” ‘Manithan’ in Tamzih means human!
Let us get this
straight and right: just because we had a few bad experiences with a few
‘unevolved’ people, it does not make the whole human race bad. The number of
peace-loving people in the world is far, far more than the small number of
misguided, blood-thirsty extremists. There are more mothers around than the
draconian mothers-in-law (saas) that
Indian brides keep fearing! There are so many, many more people that are
willing to help you in Life, at work, on the street, than that are out to cheat
you or exploit you. There is so much goodness that’s waiting to be embraced and
experienced from fellow humans than all the misery that we see and all the
miserable people that we dread. To see the goodness in people, in Life, you
need to stop generalizing and extrapolating your past experiences, and simply
learn to trust both people and Life!
The 15th
century mystic weaver-poet Kabir (1440 ~ 1518) says, “The river that flows in
you also flows in me.” He championed seeing the oneness in creation and argued
that if you could trust yourself, you could trust others. Lalon Fakir (1774 ~
1890), a singer belonging to the wandering mystic sect, Bauls, criticized the
superficiality of religious divisions in the 1850s when he sang these
lines: “Everyone asks: "Lalon, what's your
religion in this world?" Lalon answers: "How does religion
look?" I've never laid eyes on it. Some wear malas [Hindu rosaries] around
their necks, some tasbis [Muslim rosaries], and so people say they've got
different religions. But do you bear the sign of your religion when you come or
when you go?” This, incidentally, was
the moot question raised by Aamir Khan’s PK too!
As much as we seem
we are divided by religion, community, color of skin, nationality, social
standing, education, wealth and whatever, we are still united and one as
people. Goodness, in ourselves, and in others, like beauty, lies in the eyes of
the beholder. So, change the way you see people. Learn to trust them. And in
the event you still are let down and your trust is shattered one more time,
treat it as the handiwork of someone unevolved, view it as another exception
and not the rule. Trusting, forgiving, moving on, you will have
found one sure way to live happily, peacefully!
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