By: Shiben Krishen Raina
The holy days of Ramadan are to begin shortly and shall eventually conclude with the festivity of Eid. The entire Ramazan-month carries the message of service to mankind. More precisely the message is: let the hearts be filled with love, souls with compassion and minds with wisdom. In short, it is a call to uphold and abide by basic human values and respect humanity.
Humanity is a blissful virtue that every person under the sun needs to follow in his life. Selfless service, compassion, empathy, tolerance, and truthfulness are the cardinal principles of humanity. The purity of heart, too, is one of the basic components of humanity.
A person whose mind is pure and devoid of any deceit attains ecstatic bliss and unity with the God while as one whose mind is full of deceit, indulging in fraudulent acts, deception and vanity can never realize and attain the real pleasure of life. His mind will always be absorbed in ways wherein he could cause harm to others, look down upon them, accrue wealth by illegal means and misuse his power for his personal gains.However rich or famous such persons might be, they will never be able to succeed in attaining peace of mind. Such arrogant persons shall be perpetually surrounded by worries. Their sinful acts would haunt them always and disturb their peace of mind and one day they would stand exposed for their wrong deeds.
Therefore, to remain happy, fearless, cool, and contented, one should adopt virtues of simplicity, purity, humility, and compassion. Also, one should discard harmful traits of deceit, shrewdness, vanity, and abhorrence and thus bring his words, mind, and deeds in complete harmony with humanity.
The question arises as to how these moral virtues of humanity could be generated in human minds? Till now the educational source of moral and human values, standards and virtues in the world used to be religions and their allied scriptures. However, with the growth of materialistic pursuits and a general decline in religious beliefs in modern-day society, there has been a considerable deterioration in human conduct and approach as well. Apathetic attitude towards learning and imbibing high moral values as laid down in our holy books have added increasingly to person’s materialistic and vain mentality.That is why he has become anti-social,cynical and eccentric.
Need of the hour is that social and moral education based on the high values inscribed in our holy scriptures be imparted to knowledge-seekers more especially to our younger generation.
