Our own GOOD world

It is my dream to get my neurons fired in a perfect setting. e. g. I am sitting in a french window looking upon vast greens, holding a steaming hot cup of coffee. Well, as you can guess, it doesn't really happen that way. What I am going to write is what I began thinking about when I was cleaning the vessels!! What a perfect setting! Well.. something better than nothing..

It was the time when these serial blasts happened in number of cities in India. In my opinion, there are two ways to look at the situation. You can suggest the third one, if any. One being macroscopic and other being microscopic way. I started with the later. Let me think about what happened to me. If I sit down and try to make a list of people whom I hate, how long does my list go? Hmmn... OK. I thought about my childhood, adolescence and past few years. Whom do I hate? I did not know that this was such a difficult question. It does not mean that my life has been rosy pink. I have had unusual childhood when compared to an average maharashtrian kid from city. I have had bitter experiences. But, the question is, do I hate the people associated with such experiences? Notice the word associated. What I mean by that is, if I had a bad experience in my childhood for which I thought person X was responsible at that point of time, in retrospection, largely, I found those people to behave in that way given the circumstances that were there and the kind of thinking they show. And as a result, I tend to erase the label 'bitter' and just catalogue it as 'an' experience in my brain. The hidden meaning of the dialogue (or monologue) above is that every person is good. This can be more evident in the 'networked' world. Let us take an example of Orkut. Strange as it may sound, it is true. I did an experiment. In my post graduate class, there were certain people who sort of troubled me (knowingly or unknowingly). As a result, I kept away from them as much as possible. The image that I had in my mind of them was obviously murky. This troubled me a bit for some reason. What I did was I visited their Orkut page and read the testimonials that other people had written. Apparently, to those who had written testimonials, these people were real good human beings. That struck me as a bolt of light. Wow! it was a discovery (or reinvention of things that someone has already said somewhere).. really there was no reason for me to dislike anyone. Trust me, it is a fantastic feeling! One often takes hatred and dislike as normal reactions and gets used to their expression. What we forget is that we just don't express, but also carry an impression of it in our mind which is a mighty heavy load. After shaking that off, I really felt light and refreshed. And something very important is that if I want to make a list of people who have been really good to me, it will be a LOOOOOOONG one (that includes people from many religions).

Now let me turn to the macroscopic view, where I am just a dot in the picture. Obviously, there is lot of pain, agony, hatred. We can say that unless one goes through the situation that these blast or terrorism victims did, it is easy to blabber about liking everyone around, peace, love and blah blah. I know that. And I agree that what happened and is happening is hurting, leaving scars. But, is revenge always the way? I can not say. What I want to say is, let us start at the grass root level. From self. Me liking (or at least, not hating) x number of people is going to have an exponential effect. Forgive and forget is really possible. Small small things one day reflect in one huge thing.

I see a good chance that if one thinks and decides, it is possible to make it happen. I am positive and have a lot of hope in the fact in near future, everyone will feel that it is 'our own good world' that we live in.

Cheers!

Nandini