Can You Love those who Hate You ?

Perhaps one of the greatest teachings of Jesus Christ is his teaching about the importance of learning and practising to remove all kinds of hatreds from our minds.

Hardly any one would be there who has not heard of this. Yet it is the most difficult advice most people find to adopt in practice.

For those are still apprehensive about what Jesus had said, I would like to reproduce below the verses from the gospels:

In Luke 6:27 we read like this : "But to you who are willing to listen, I say, love your enemies! Do good to those who hate you."

Jesus is quoted as this in Matthew 5:44 : But I say, love your enemies! Pray for those who persecute you!"

Further we read like this in Luke 6:35 : "Love your enemies! Do good to them. Lend to them without expecting to be repaid. Then your reward from heaven will be very great, and you will truly be acting as children of the Most High, for he is kind to those who are unthankful and wicked."

Jesus further instructed like this as written in the Bible in Mark 11:25 : "But when you are praying, first forgive anyone you are holding a grudge against, so that your Father in heaven will forgive your sins, too."

I do not want to quote all those verses from the Bible on this.

For most people, Christians included, these are perhaps the most impractical advice of Jesus Christ. 

How can you forgive and love those who have done misdeeds on you ? How can we forget and forgive those who keep working against us and hate us?

For us the Bible verses from the Old Testament appears appealing. In  Deuteronomy 19:21 we are instructed by God like this : "You must show no pity for the guilty! Your rule should be life for life, eye for eye, tooth for tooth, hand for hand, foot for foot."

So even if Jesus might have given us the New Law later, we prefer to cling to the Old Law of the Bible !

Here at least, we prefer to disagree with Jesus Christ ! After all Jesus was our sacrificial lamb. That he did and we are very thankful to him. He died for our sins ! Let him not teach us those impractical things. If we do not take revenge on our enemies and those who keep working against us what is left in this life ? What pleasure if our revengeful mind cannot be satisfied ?

We do not wish to be rewarded in Heaven later. What matters most to us is what is there in this life here at this moment.

All other things may be good for the preachers to preach ! Of course we love to hear those preachings also, if it works as a penance all the good !

But Jesus' preaching on this was very categorical and precise. My favorite the Urantia Book describes what Jesus told on this a bit more elaborate in UB 140:3.15 onwards.

I have personally experienced the power of practising this great advice that Jesus gave to mankind.

The moment you forgive your enemies or those who are unkind and hateful or wrong doers to you and keep no grudge or hatred or thoughts of revenge on them, practically you become more powerful. I think it is a great providential blessing. We can realize it and I tell you I have realized it.

Before I conclude this blog here, let me briefly narrate an incidence which happened some time ago which pinched my consciousness, though it never concerned me directly any way.

It mattered to me because it was an incidence involving the family of a priest belonging to the denomination of the Indian Church to which I am a member. Again at the time of this incidence, this priest was the vicar of my home parish.

He had a daughter who worked in a Persian Gulf country where the Muslim law based on the principle of the 'eye for an eye' prevailed.

Most unfortunately, this lady was murdered by an young man who was a subordinate to her in her office, perhaps out of some animosity this young man developed on his superior bossy lady. He became more furious perhaps due to the fact that this young lady belonged to the same community to which he was also a part. Besides, both were working in a foreign country and the lady apparently did not show any consideration to him on these grounds.

So one day this young man planned to settle scores with her and he killed her- an young mother and wife from his own community. Both Indian Christians working in a Muslim country.

Soon he was arrested, jailed and sentenced to be put to death by the firing squad according to that country's laws.

The Muslim Sharia based law of that country had a provision for the sentenced person to be pardoned from such harsh punishments if the immediate relative or family member is willing to give pardon to him.

Now all the attention shifted to the young Keralite man who belonged to a prominent Christian community who was going to be executed brutally by the firing squad of a foreign country.

But there was a small ray of hope for him. That was the fact that he could be pardoned by the victim's family. The victim was daughter of a Christian priest who preached Jesus Christ and sermoned about the importance of forgiving those who did wrongs ! And the accused also belonged to the same community !

I remember those days when I eagerly watched to know the fate of this young man. Not only me, thousands in my community all over the world watched and waited anxiously.

Though we all felt sorry for the young woman and her family, the thought of brutal punishment on the young man was more repulsive to many. So many wished that this Christian priest would be able to practise what he preached all his life time and would extend the most needed pardon on this young man and save his life.

Regrettably that did not happen and the young man was shortly punished with bullets !

For days I was feeling too bad. This has been haunting me.

The 'Christian priest' could have set an example just as the widow of the Australian Missionary Graham Stains, who pardoned her husband's murderers.

The Christian community leaders from my state all kept themselves silent and it was such an incident that they failed courage to discuss.

I haven't heard much about the pleasure of revenge that the priest gained later, except that he resigned from his priesthood and his life became something filled with further sorrows and agonies.

We can discuss about this incident and argue much on both sides.

But what I wanted to stress is this. However hard it is to forgive those who do wrongs on you, the rewards of such a forgiveness is indeed much more satisfying than the pleasure of revenge !

Would it be possible for us to realize this ?

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Over Anxious Parents !

Today Google reminded me of Charles Dickens, one of my favorite story tellers whose novels I had the opportunity to study in my school days as part of our English literature class. This great writer was born 200 years ago and lived and watched England during the peak times of the Industrial revolution in that country.

The Pickwick Papers, Oliver Twist, The Tale of Two Cities, David Copperfield, etc interestingly depicted the life of people on those days in England.

Of all the things what this great writer humorously detailed out for the attention of his readers, what got my special attention as a school boy in a village in one corner of India after over a century is the way in which our school education system has evolved.

Dickens took special interest in depicting the old school headmasters and their tough styles by which they disciplined the boys.

The teachers of our times were also not very different. There were tough task masters who used to find pleasure in punishing the children for every small and big mistakes with their sticks and canes in every school. The toughest one being the head master. The children used to be scared of such beating masters even in their dreams.

When I was a student, I remember the adults of our times recalling their school experiences occasionally. By what they used to describe, they all had a tough time in their school days with heavy syllabus to study and pretty little to eat. Some thing similar to the days of Charles Dickens !

Fortunately during my days, the syllabus was not so tough, at least in my home state Kerala for those schools affiliated to the state government's education board. Fortunately that was the only kind of education available for almost every one in the state. Though we had heard of the existence of some other kind of schools which followed a tougher syllabus, apparently for the boys and girls from the elite and the rich class, such schools were not very visible.

Fortunately, when I was a high school student, my school had a team of matured and well natured gentlemen as our teachers. They were very broad minded and were not very keen in making us mug up the text books. They were liberal and encouraged us to read widely and discuss the things with them without fear or remorse. Some of them used to tell us that we should read the text books also for answering the examinations for the purpose of scoring and securing a mandatory school certificate and not essentially for acquiring knowledge and wisdom!

Those days, the majority of the parents never took extra ordinary interests in our studies. Though occasionally they used to remind us about the importance of studies, they never ever seriously interfered with our studies or day to day progress in the schools. The exposure what we got in the schools were sufficient for us to get the grasp of the subjects and we had plenty of free time for extra readings and other activities. Schools were never a botheration or pressure.

Under such a scenario, the Charles Dickens stories were humorous and enjoyable, as it gave us an opportunity to compare the education scene in those century old days and the levels at which we had progressed that we no more were afraid of our teachers or the text books.

But things did not remain that way. I think, it has slipped back to the Charles Dickens era. Just after I majored from the school, the government in my state went for a major overhaul of the syllabus making it extremely difficult for the students and the teachers. The ambitious policy planners were too eager to teach the students of all the great developments that had been taking place in science in one go, lest they go behind in the world in knowledge and competency.

As the school syllabus became heavier and heavier, it was no longer easy for the teachers to cover those things in the class in the time allotted. Students who were weak in grasping things soon found that they were no longer in a position to get good scores in their examinations which tested mostly their capacity to memorize from the thousands of new concepts of the so-called modern knowledge.

Passing the school examinations became more and more difficult. The school examination certificates with good scores became the yard sticks for admissions to higher learning and the fate determiner of the future career of most students.

Parents soon began to get anxious about the future of their wards. Private owned schools appearing in the guise of English medium public schools soon were thought as the panacea for the parents to over come their anxieties.

They were fooled. The education planners were bribed by the new venture capitalists in the education scene who pretty well understood the great opportunity that existed by keeping the anxieties of the parents as high as possible always to do every thing possible to enhance the difficulties for the students in their studies by loading up their study materials.

It was all for the better future of their wards. The boys and girls need to be taught everything in this world before it is too late! Who can find fault with this kind of a good thinking after all.

The poor over anxious parents are spending through their noses for educating their children. They try the best schools that take the highest fees and the heaviest study loads on their children. After the schools, the children are sent to scores of coaching centres for additional coaching so that the child is trained and trained in all possible manner to score over ninety nine percent in the examinations if possible.

Stressed up boys and girls who are not able to cope up with this decide to say good bye to their pretty lives in scores every year in every nook and corner of this country. Their numbers keep increasing year after year.

But yet no one ever dares to say a thing. How can they ? Some soldiers always die in a war. They say.

I was just thinking. 

Do I ever need all these mathematics, physics, chemistry and all the other things that the schools are so eager to force educate to do my job or that matter any one's job. I have serious doubts.

But then these things are not for imparting knowledge or skills. It is meant for creating a business which has a potential of billions. The success of the business lies in keeping the poor parents as anxious as ever. The more anxious they are the more they are willing to spend on 'educating' their children. Even at the cost of their dear children!

Dear Charles Dickens! Would you please re-incarnate once again to write some more novels with a few of our children as your characters ?

[I remember discussing this issue with a prominent politician from our state over a decade ago. He was a powerful minister at that time and also happened to be the father-in-law of a very senior bureaucrat. The latter was brother of a classmate of mine and hence I knew their family backgrounds to some extent. The minister acknowledged the issue I raised and admitted that he agreed with me fully. But then he cited the example of his bureaucrat son-in-law who he said was so worried and anxious about the studies of his school going children who happened to be in the 'best' available English Medium Public School in the state capital. Though the bureaucrat himself had a very humble schooling in his village schools he was 'anxious' about the 'best education' possibility for his children! What he forgot was that life opportunities do not necessarily be what we plan. So what the minister was stressing was that if this could be the feeling of a top notch bureaucrat, who could rise to top career position without the so-called English Medium Public School education, the not-so-fortunate citizens would be no better. They are all likely to imitate the rich and the famous or the so-called celebrities! If the celebrity is anxious, the followers are also going to be anxious ! Anyway this was the explanation of this politician who understood the psyche of the masses well.] 

How to Kill a Successful Organization ?

Don't ask me why I selected a title like this for this blog. Some of you are familiar with famous book titles like 'the games people play'. Knowingly or unknowingly people also play 'games' aiming at killing or destroying successful organizations.

Organizations are well knit networks of people for accomplishing some defined tasks or objectives in a defined framework of rules or bylaws. There are governmental organizations and non-governmental organizations, business organizations and non-business organizations, charity and non-charity organizations, professional and non-professional organizations, registered and non-registered organizations, etc., etc.

Our governments function through various kinds of organizations. Businesses are carried out through organizations called companies or firms. In short every individual now-a-days is associated with one or more kinds of organizations. Even your family is one kind of organization, perhaps a smaller version of it.

If you are an employed person you belong to an organization which employs you and you work within the organization to earn your livelihood.

So government departments, companies, societies, trusts, partnership firms, institutions, professional bodies, etc are all organizations.

Organizations are for the collective benefit of the individuals of the society or the nation. But unfortunately, organizations which do destructive, anti-social or illegal activities also exist. But for the purpose of this discussion I do not include the latter here.

I want to discuss only about those organizations which are set up for objectives which are legally approved , socially acceptable and for the common good of both the individuals within the organization and outside it.

I consider such an organization successful if it is fulfilling its objectives reasonably well for quite some time and has made a visible presence in the society by their collective efforts.

If the public and those members or individuals connected to the organization generally perceive the organization as good, then the organization can be deemed as successful.

Just as individuals, organizations also has a birth, a childhood, an adult hood, periods of sickness and old age and even death.

Unlike individuals whose life expectancy is determined by natural law and cannot exceed certain maximum, organizations can be kept alive and healthy for longer periods by some techniques known as 'good organizational management'.

If the head is the main organ of an individual, the head of the organization is perhaps the most important member of an organization. He or she is called the Chief Executive Officer (CXO) of the organization.

Just as a brain dead individual can be kept alive for some time, a headless organization also can be kept alive for some time without performing.

Just as individuals have parents, organizations also have parents, some one who takes initiatives in creating it. But once an organization gets created and gets a good CXO and survives its infancy period, it is normally capable of surviving provided its CXO functions well.

Unlike individuals, organizations are capable of replacing its heads by itself or by adopting self sustainable techniques devised for its survival.

However big or strong an organization, its strength and weakness both lies with its CXO. Interestingly, this CXO has to be an individual. Experiments to have a sub organization as a CXO have been found not so successful.

Just as successful individuals have other individuals as their envious enemies, successful organizations also can get such kind of enemies who try to destroy it or weaken it from time to time. This is the threat to any organization.

Even individuals who grudge an  enmity or envy can pose a threat to an organization. Even individual members of an organization sometimes become intellectually or mentally sick posing an internal threat to an organization's existence.

Though normally, such periodical threats and attacks are overcome by an organization which is run by an efficient  CXO. Organizations where good systems and practices are in place also can resist such attacks for quite some time.

But clever enemies who are determined to destroy an organization knows the trick to accomplish their task. They know that the CXO is their trump card. What they normally do is to get a characterless and incompetent person selected and installed as the CXO of the organization.

They know very well that an incompetent driver, pilot or captain can very easily drive the truck, plane or ship to destruction very easily.

And exactly that is how the enemies, both internal and external, of an organization try to destroy a successful organization.

First get a pliable, not so experienced or competent individual, project him as great and then install him as the CXO of that very successful organization as its CXO.

Occasionally some organization parents, out of sheer love and affection to some individuals, allow them to direct the organization, just as some wealthy kids are allowed to drive the expensive car by their parents before they get the driving license, to the eventuality of an accident later.

In either case, one thing is sure. If the CXO of the organization is an incompetent and characterless person, the organization will definitely suffer seriously. But the effects may not be visible immediately always !

Leadership by efficient, competent and honest individuals is the key to success for any organization.