WITH RESPECT TO

Thinking of respecting....

                       WITH RESPECT TO

 

                              Respect is the word I hated most in my childhood. Everybody told me I must respect teachers and all elders. But nobody explained to me why I should. The words respect and fear had almost same meaning in my mind till my college days. By then these two words got so intermingled in my intellect in such a way that it was almost difficult to disentangle them in many situations. Even today my mind is very confusedly conditioned that it doesn’t know what to take out respect or fear in many a life situations.

                            We were exhorted incessantly by the vicar of our parish to be God-fearing citizens of his diocese. But life experiences taught me that fear and love can never go together. When the same vicar one day told me that God is love I determined to replace my fear of God by respect for God. Because respect will have enough chinks for the love to pass through it. So I thought I can love god without much inhibitions.

                             One particularity about ethics is, you can comprehend its significance only when you try to violate it for the first time. As we don’t respect each other in the family, (we love each other) there wasn’t any possibility to violate respect in my home. So it was in the school I broke the laws of respect for the first time. I just giggled while my chemistry teacher chided me for not doing homework. It was interpreted as lack of respect and I was duly punished. Once I could break it, I lost all respect for respect. There after disrespecting became my means of cheering myself up. I began to create many theses regarding ways of disrespecting others. You can disrespect a person either in positive way or in negative way. To disrespect a person positively you break the formalities in a loving way. Say your boss suprabhatham instead of good morning, while sending email address him as dad or brother (not darling), forward him sms on special days..such and such things.This expands communicable area in a positive way between you and the person to be respected if you are candid and faithful.

                        Yes sayings like “give respect and take respect” are literally true. Never break norms of respect expecting respect in return. After all, respect feeds the ego of the person to be respected. In that sense in my opinion it is not so a charming quality to be given and taken. Because once you feed the ego of a person it becomes hungrier than ever. He will go to the extend of establishing a claim on respect that is his due. In the course he will never remember to return the same. That is how the most poisonous thing in the universe EGO works. After all, who deserves respect and who does not when every living organism is equal in the eye of the creator of universe? So I would like to rewrite the saying as “never give respect and never take respect”

                         In the modern world, the only group of individuals, starving of respect is teachers. 90 % of student population in India loses respect for their teachers by the time they reach high school. Still they pretend respect for the sake of the maxim Acharya Devo Bhava..!!! Teachers keep on cursing the corrupt generations that fill up the earth year after year. They accuse erosion of cultural values, moral values due to evasion of western culture, forgetting the simplest mechanism by which respect is made possible. Give Respect And Take Respect or Never give respect And never take.

                        A student begins to disrespect a particular teacher when he perceives disparity between what teacher says and what she does, OR that between what syllabus says and what teacher says and how teacher says it(her competency) Irregularities and imbalances are going on and on in these areas thanks to the commercialization of education sector.

                                   I hate to respect. I hate being respected too. Because respect creates a wall between the hearts of respected and respecting. It is a formality that distorts the divine norm of equality. The respecting person(giver of respect) alienate the respected one. The respecting person feeds the ego of respected. Each person in the universe has his own role that is unique and incomparable to others roles. This “respect” helps only to catalyze sectarian outlook in the society.

 

                  Let us not respect anybody and never wish to be respected by anybody. Replace respect with trust. Replace respect with love. Love and trust only. Everything else is hypocrisy. Note that love and trust are made for each other’s existence. Love exhales trust and trust inhales love and vice versa. I love you.