The Lesson Learnt

Every day ,Nature keeps teaching you a lesson or two, but it solely depends on you if you wanna accept it or not.This was a piece of an advice my dad had given me during my school days, something I let to pass off through my ears. But now I feel , I am experiencing the worth of those words .When you observe things or events around you, you receive lots of data that pokes your thought.Even though you get them in bits and pieces, when you correlate things it just opens up a fabulous message or a thought provoking idea or a staggering eye opener. The Nature gives you everything you ever need to know, but giving it a patient hearing is what you have to do first. Just had one such experience which I thought is worth sharing.

Last week, I had a visit to a temple situated in Kannur, the neighboring district of my native. The visit was something planned long back, but the realization of the same took more than a year and a half.After the visit, I was waiting outside the temple for my mom.She was held up in a queue for "prasadam". Fortunately , buttermilk was being supplied to the devotees at the entrance and thus I could find a bit of relief in that scorching heat.Feeling refreshed , I took a dekko through the area and my eyes just froze over a frame, something that was destined to carve a long lasting impression in me . A woman in black burqua (The dress suggested me she was a Muslim ) was at the entrance of the temple. Her anxious face suggested she had come looking for something or someone. She talked to a person at the entrance and went in the temple. After a few minutes, she came out, gulped in a glass of butter milk which was offered to her and she went off. My eyes were fixed on her till the moment she was lost in the crowd.

The most interesting thing was that none around seemed bothered at all. The whole scene seemed impalpable for me, not that a Muslim woman entered a Hindu temple ( I always believed a place of worship should be open to all), but how people had reacted. I would say secularism at its very best. In a world where there are nations which prohibit you from following your traditions, ideologies which propagate hatred and violence, agendas for dissecting the social attitude of human society , You couldn't get a better example which would rightly degrade the basic hate propaganda. Everyday we come through various articles, conferences, proclamations on secularism, national integration songs aired across radio stations ,Netas giving out never ending speeches on fraternity and still the very menace of communalism prevails more than ever before.

Its not lack of education that motivates people into any sort of communal shenanigans, its not that people are not aware that hurting others sentiments is not a fruitful activity, but its the very conscious reminiscence of ramification of human society on basis of various factors that creates fear, lack of trust and even hatred. For whatever reason she came to the temple, I respect her attitude and trust that she laid on her fellow beings. Her appearance didn't give me an impression of that of a well educated woman , but then what do I mean by educated. If education cant strip me off my notions about religious insecurity and conscious scrutiny of people of other communities, am I educated!

The response of the people were even better, nobody questioned her, none gazed at her; they moved on with their activities and even offered a glass full of energy and love to a tiring woman. No media were there to flash their cameras, no decorations to dig in a fancy show out of it, no chief guests to witness a 'communal harmony" event, but a normal unnoticed event that portrayed love and trust for fellow human beings.

Its not that people in the scene were reminded about the essence of communal harmony and then they got involved in a "noble" act, possibly they would have never ever thought about it; they just played their part in the inevitable social dependency chain of human interaction. In fact they would be screwing me for complicating my perception of a normal event They would feel they did nothing special, but the whole scene means a lot in a frustrated, restless and intolerant society. Action spoke better than words, but people like me find time only to glorify them in words. Write-ups like this come and go, motivates people for self-actualization , but we forget that a bit of common sense and the world would be an entirely different place to live in.