VALUE EDUCATION IN A GRAMMAR BOOK

 VALUE EDUCATION IN A GRAMMAR BOOK

                        It is interesting to note that language books not only impart knowledge but also give character-building tips.  In a grammar book on English, I found a good many short sentences loaded with wit and wisdom.  They had not only a touch of moral and ethical values but also the essence of social, political, commercial, religious and philosophical experiences. 

Given below are fifty such extracts collected from a single book meant for secondary school students. . They are easily memorable and worth quoting whenever a suitable occasion is there.  Moreover, they are as good as the words coming out of the lips of learned guides, advisors and counsellors.

            It took me hardly an hour to pick them up and present them here for the benefit of all and sundry.   

1.     Still waters run deep.

2.     Cleanliness is next to godliness.

3.     Wisdom is better than strength.

4.     Without health there is no happiness.

5.     Every dog had his day.

6.     A live ass is better than a dead lion.

7.     There should not be much talk and little work.

8.     Good wine needs no bush.

9.     It is an ill wind that blows nobody good.

10.                        Hunger is the best sauce.

11.                         Small people love to talk of great men.

12.                        . Open rebuke is better than secret love.

13.                        Of two evils choose the less.

14.                        The longest lane has a turning.

15.                         While there is life, there is hope.

16.                         They never fail who die for a great cause.

17.                        There is nothing like staying at home for comfort.

18.                        An umbrella is of no avail against a thunderstorm.

19.                        We seldom see ourselves as others see us.

20.                         Whosoever shall exalt himself shall be abased.

21.                         He that is content is rich.

22.                        He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty.

23.                        You who are mighty should be merciful.

24.                        You who seek wisdom should be humble.

25.                        He that is down, needs fear no fall.

26.                         Those who live in glass houses must not throw stones.

27.                         Who laughs last laughs best.

28.                        Those whom the gods love die young.

29.                         

30.                        He who has lost all hope has also lost all fear.

31.                        Time changes all things.

32.                        New brooms sweep clean.

33.                        A rolling stone gathers no moss.

34.                        A burnt child dreads the fire.

35.                        Amassing wealth often ruins health.

36.                        Success is not merely winning applause.

37.                        Rome was not built in a day.

38.                        Too many cooks spoil the broth.

39.                        38. Wisdom is too high for a fool.

40.                        Trust in God and do what is right.  

41.                        Neither a lender, nor a borrower be.

42.                         Blessed are the merciful, for they shall obtain mercy.

43.                        Wisdom is better than rubies.

44.                        Heard melodies are sweet but those unheard are sweeter.

45.                        It is the common doom of man that he must eat his bread by the sweat of his brow.

46.                        Religion does not banish mirth but only moderates and sets rules to it.

47.                        It is a great loss to a man if he cannot laugh.

48.                        Natural thirst is more deliciously gratified with water, than artificial thirst is with wine.

49.                        The real dignity of a man lies in what he has, and not in what he is.

50.                        There are many truths of which the full meaning cannot be realized until person experience has brought it home.        

22^nd November 2019                                                 -----G. R. KANWAL

    

LIVING WITH A PURPOSE

                               LIVING WITH A PURPOSE

What should a person live for is a vital question. And it is a question which all human beings should be able to answer. A life without purpose, aim, ambition or aspiration is no life. It is not only meaningless but also wasteful. Ordinary people who lack reflective faculty do not think about the purpose of life, although they live an active, productive life in their respective fields of occupation. However, their contribution to the evolution of life is not very significant.  It is only those great social, political, religious, scientific, philosophical activists, scholars, researchers, discoverers and inventors who leave footprints on the sands of time and become men and women of all time.  Such people use their God-given abilities of head, heart and soul in the service of mankind most extraordinarily and become not only the lasting benefactors of mankind but also enlist themselves among the immortals.

Gandhi, Buddha, Mahavira, Mohammad, Guru Nanak, Shakespeare, Kalidas, Rabindranath Tagore, Alfred Nobel, Sir Isaac Newton, Charles Darwin, Louis Pasteur, Sir J. C. Bose, Michael Faraday, George Stephenson, J.N.Tata, Henry Ford, Napoleon Bonaparte, Karl Marx, Raja Ram Mohan Roy, Sir Syed Ahmad Khan, Subhash Chandra Bose, Jawaharlal Nehru, Sardar Patel, Sir Mohammad Iqbal, and many more lived with a purpose , almost every day of their life, and consequently made themselves unforgettable in the annals of the world.

            Given below is a poem taken from the best poetry of the world.  Its author George Linnaeus Banks (1821-1881) was a British journalist, editor, poet, playwright, actor, orator and Methodist. But before I quote the poem let me add that the people who live with a purpose are highly creative and dynamic and never feel unmotivated or uninspired.   

The title of the poem is ‘What I Live For’.  Its beauty is that the poet here lives for multiple pleasures and duties of life.  He is not selective and isolationist but comprehensive and inclusivisi.   There is nothing for which he does not live because he thinks that this is the best way to fulfil ‘God’s great design.”

            WHAT I LIVE FOR

I live for those who love me,

Whose hearts are kind and true;

For the Heaven that smiles above me,

And awaits my spirit too’

For all human ties that bind me,

For the task by God assigned me,

For the bright hopes yet to find me,

And the good that I can do.

I live to learn their story

Who suffered for my sake

To emulate their glory,

And follow in their wake;

Bards, patriots, martyrs, sages,

The heroric of all ages,

Whose deeds crowd History’s pages,

And Time’s great volume make.

I live to hold communion

With all that is divine,

To feel there is a union

‘Twixt Nature’s heart and mine;

To profit by affliction,

Reap truth from fields of fiction,

Grow wiser from conviction,

And fulfil God’s great design.

I live to hail that season

By gifted ones foretold,

When men shall live by reason,

And not alone by gold;

When man to man united,

And every wrong thing righted,

The whole world shall be lighted

As Eden was of old.

I live for those who love me,

For those who know me true,

For the Heaven that smiles above me,

And awaits my spirit too;

For the cause that lacks assistance,

For the wrong that needs resistance,

For the future in the distance,

And the good that I can do.

21^st November 2019                                            G. R. KANWAL 

   

REMEMBERING INDIRA GANDHI

                                                           

REMEMBERING INDIRA GANDHI

Mrs. Indira Gandhi, a former Prime Minister of India, was born on 119^th   November 1917 at Allahabad now renamed as Prayagraj.  Her full name was Indira Priyadarshini Nehru.  She was married to Feroze Gandhi in 1942. A great politician, stateswoman and a central figure of the Indian National Congress, she was assassinated in New Delhi on 31^st October 1984 when she was a little older   than 66 years. Her resting place in Delhi is known as Shakti Sthal. India celebrates   her birthday as National Integration Day. According to her political party, the Indian Nation Congress, Mrs. Gandhi is a symbol of indomitable spirit of India’s unity, harmony and sovereignty.  Today i.e.14^th November 2019 is her 102^nd birthday.

            In this short memoriam, we would have a cursory look at her peculiarly informal education and also read a few important one-liners randomly picked up from her innumerable speeches.

            Mrs. Indira Gandhi‘s first and most important tutor was her own father Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru.  He was a leading freedom fighter and was frequently put into prison by the British Government for long periods. As a child, Mrs.  Gandhi had no settled life.  Her mother Mrs. Kamala Nehru (born in Delhi on 1^st August 1899) was also a freedom fighter.  She passed away on 28^th February 1936 at Lausanne in Switzerland as a patient of tuberculosis which was then. This pitiable situation of being motherless and having a father who was virtually a prison bird, her education could not have a regular start in any educational institution.  It was in such circumstances that her father Pt. Jawaharlal Nehru started educating her through letters written from the premises of the jail where he was serving his term.  

             The above-mentioned education through letters lasted over two years. Subsequently, the whole lot was published in the form of a book entitled “Glimpses of World History.”

As soon as the tutorial task was over, Pt. Nehru wrote what he called the Last Letter to Indira in August 1933. Here is a short extract from that letter:          

            “Your must not take what I have written in these letters as the final authority on any subject. A politician wants to have a say on every subject, and he always pretends to know much more than he actually does. He has to be watched carefully! These letters of mine are but superficial sketches joined together by a thin thread.  I have rambled on, skipping centuries and many important happenings, and then pitching my tent for quite a long time on some event which interested me.  As you will notice, my likes and dislikes are pretty obvious, and so also sometimes are my moods in gaol. I do not want you to take all this for granted; there may indeed be many errors in my accounts .A prison, with no libraries or reference books at hand, are not the most suitable place to write on historical subjects. I have had to rely very largely on the many note-books which I have accumulated since I began my visits to gaol twelve years ago. Many books have also come to me here; they have come and gone, for I could not collect a library here.”     

            Now, a few one-liners:

1.     Communalism, whether it is Hindu or Muslim or Sikh or by any other community, is deplorable.

2.     The older generation will always think that the younger people are wrong.

3.     Life has meaning only through dedication to great causes.

4.     The functioning of democracy should be judged not merely by the size of the electorate, or the percentage of people exercising their franchise, but by the faith which they have in representative institutions.

5.     To have discipline among children, it is necessary to have discipline among the whole population.

6.     The quality of education must be reflected in the quality of life, in its value and grace, in the culture of the social and individual mind and not the least in our intellectual and technological competence to face and master the problems before us.

7.      Engineers are not only builders in steel and concrete but also builders of the nation.

8.     It is obvious that farmers will pay heed to the call for national self-sufficiency only to the ex tent that the programme makes a difference to their lives.

9.     The policies of a country are motivated by its national interests, which are conditioned by Its heritage, traditions and the requirements of the people.

10.                         Dead or dying ideas not only obstruct change but can considerably harm individuals as well as nations.

11.                        We must strengthen and develop all our national languages and give due attention to the task of producing inexpensive books and translations in millions, so that they become vehicles of knowledge and culture, and keep abreast of the progress of science and technology.

12.                        It is necessary to inculcate a regard for every life, which implies respecting everything which maintains health and life, respecting the vital elements of air, water and earth.

13.                        Science is in itself a spirit of enquiry as well as a tool for modernising India a and Indian thought and liberating men from prejudice and superstition.l

14.                        On the issue of what we call secularism, we can never be aligned with any party which believes in one religion or one race or one language.

15.                        Youth is really an attitude of mind; youth is eagerness, the desire to know, to discover the feeling that all of life is not behind us but ahead of us; that the great adventure is not something that has happened, but is going to happen.    

19^TH NOVEMBER 2019               ------G. R. KANWAL

OLD AGE

                                                                      

                                                                         OLD   AGE

            Old age is a mixed blessing. To live a long life is the earnest wish of almost everybody. There are very few people who hate this world to such an extent that they would like to die young. In fact, most of us are afraid of death because we cannot know what happens to us when we are withdrawn from this world to which we get attached in many ways.

            Old people are free from many such weaknesses as they had in their youth. Now there is no passion, no impatience, no intolerance, no temptation, no bitterness, no sensuality, no lust, and no hankering after fleeting  pleasures of the body. There is a greater closeness with God.  In fact, old people direct their attention to holy books, chant the name of their Creator as frequently as possible.  When the night comes and sleep seems to be delaying itself. they recite some short or long prayer to induce sleep to come urgently and relieve them from the torture of insomnia.

            The days and the nights of old people are uncomfortable, if they are afflicted with any disease for which they depend upon multiple medications.  Another curse for some old people is their loneliness. If they are spouseless and have been left alone by their offspring, time becomes very heavy.

            Yet, old age can be maintained as a blessing if one does not sit idle. Action rather than contemplation is the secret of happiness in old age. Old people must keep themselves busy with some sort of work or hobby or social service, even if it is monetarily expensive and totally unprofitable.

Given below are the views of the two old heroes Ulysses and Rabbi Ben Ezra who appreciate old age enthusiastically and make it enjoyable for others.     

Ulysses is the Latin name of Odysseus, the mythological King of Ithaca, and the hero of Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey written in the 8^th century B.C. The word odyssey now stands for a journey of epic proportions.

             The words that follow are from Alfred Tennyson’ poem ‘Ulysses’:

“I cannot rest from travel: I will drink life to the lees….How dull it is to pause, to make an end, to rust unburnish’d, not to shine in use! Life piled upon life were all too little, and of one to me little remains: but every hour is saved from that eternal silence, something more, a bringer of new things; and vile it were for

some three years to store and hoard myself, and this grey spirit yearning in desire to follow knowledge, like a sinking star, beyond the utmost bound of human thought. ….Old age hath yet his honour and his toil; death closes all; but something ere the end, some work of noble note, may yet be done, not unbecoming men that strove with Gods. “      

                        Rabbi Ben Ezra is the hero of Robert Browning’s monologue of that name. The Rabbi in his poem is modelled on an actual figure, Abraham Ibn Ezra, a twelfth-century Neo-Platonist.

                       Browning was an optimist.  He celebrated life. While he loved the physical delights of life, he entertained none of the fears about growing old which we find in the poems of other poets. For him old age represented the culmination of a full, rich life. This is how the Rabbi begins his monologue:

                        Grow old along with me!

                        The best is yet to be.

            The last of life, for which the first was made:

                        Our times are in His hand

                        Who saith “A whole I planned,

            Youth shows but half: trust God: see all, nor be afraid1”

Somewhere in the poem, the Rabbi says: As the bird wings and sings, let us cry “All good things are ours, nor soul helps flesh more now, than flesh helps soul!

            These are in fact the words of Browning himself In whose humanism nothing is more characteristic than the importance he ascribes equally to the physical as well as the spiritual aspects of man’s twofold nature.  The first one  belongs to youth and the second to old age.

15^th November 2019                    --------G. R. KANWAL

Remembering Jawaharlal Nehru

          Remembering Jawaharlal Nehru

Pundit Jawaharlal Nehru was born on 14^th November 1889 in Allahabad (now known as Prayagraj).  His passing away which happened on 27th May 1964 came as a big shock not only to India but to the whole world.  Shantivan in Delhi is now his resting place.  His birthday used to be celebrated as Children’s Day even during his life time because of his love for children whom he regarded as the future of India.

An Independence activist who spent almost 11 years in jail, Pt. Nehru was more or less a staunch follower of Gandhiji. At the end of the British rule, he became the first Prime Minister of free India on 15^th August 1947 and remained a central figure in Indian politics till the last moment of his life.

Most of the biographers agree that Pt. Nehru had a vision of India in which getting the British out of it was merely the preliminary stage. What he was concerned with was a modernised India, with an industrial economy and an egalitarian society. Nationalist leader though he was,  he hated many of the things which most Hindus hold dear --- cow worship, subordinate status for women, temples, sadhus, astrology and caste. He was an all out believer in democracy and secularism. While finding a good deal valuable in the cultural heritage of India, he worked for the synthesis of the East and the West.

In foreign affairs, he introduced the neutral policy of Non-Alignment. As regards relationship between neighbouring countries, he offered  the policy of Panchsheel  ----- the Five Principles of peaceful coexistence, non-interference in others’ internal affairs and respect for each other’s territorial unity and sovereignty,  

It was during his imprisonment that Pt. Nehru wrote three remarkable books, Glimpses of World History (1934) An Autobiography (1936), The Discovery of India (1946).

According to Syed Mahmud, his old friend and associate of the family, Pt. Nehru disciplined himself by a regime of physical exercise, mental control and hard study. He “shepherded his fellow prisoners, nursed them, cooked for them, taught them to fend for themselves, and kept their spirits up.”

In his book on Nehru W.R.Crocker observes: Nehru’s writings illustrate a cerebral life, and a power of self-discipline, altogether out of the ordinary. Words by the million bubbled up out of his fullness of mind and spirit.  Had he never been Prime Minister of India, he would have been famous as the author of the Autobiography and the autobiographical parts of The Discovery of India.

About his occupation of reading and writing in prison, Nehru himself reveals in his Autobiography: “I occupied myself with my books, going from one type of reading to another, but usually sticking to ‘heavy’ books.  Novels made me feel mentally slack, and I did no read many of them. Sometimes I would weary of too much reading, and then I would take to writing.  My historical series of letters to my daughter kept me occupied right through my two-year term, and they helped me very greatly to keep mentally fit. To some extent I lived through the past I was writing about and almost forgot about my gaol surroundings.”  (Extract from Prison Humours),

The extract that follows is from ‘The Discovery of India’.  Nehru wrote it during his imprisonment in Ahmadnagar Fort, 13^th April 1944.  It sheds light on his love for natural beauty here that of the moon:

“The moon, ever a companion to me in prison, has grown more friendly with closer acquaintance, a reminder of the loveliness of this world, of the waxing and waning  of life, of light following darkness, of death and resurrection following each other in success. Ever changing, yet ever the same, I have watched it in its different phases and its many moods in the evening, as the shadows lengthen, in still hours of the night, and when the breath and whisper of dawn bring promise of the coming day.  How helpful is the moon in counting the days and the months, for the size and shape of the moon, when it is visible, indicate the day of the month with a fair measure of exactitude.”

 The extract that follows is also from the ‘The Discovery of India’ and is part of Nehru’s philosophy of life.  It goes like this: “Essentially, I am interested in this world, in this life, not in some other world or a future life.  Whether there is such a thing as a soul, or whether there is survival after death or not, I do not know; and, important as these questions are, they do not trouble me in the least.  The environment in which I have grown up takes the soul (or rather the atma) and a future life, the Karma theory of cause and effect, and reincarnation for granted.  I have been affected by this and so, in a sense, I am favourably disposed towards these assumptions.  There might be a soul which survives physical death of the body, and a theory of cause and effect governing life’s actions seems reasonable, though it leads to obvious difficulties when one thinks of the ultimate cause. Presuming a soul, there appears to be some logic also in the theory of reincarnation.”   

Finally, let me add what Durga Das, a son of Gandhiji, wrote about Pt. Nehru in his book “INDIA from Curzon to Nehru & After: “The Indian people made a hero of Nehru.  For ten years, he made them feel as the chosen people whose leader was the moral leader of the world.  Indeed, they began to think that India had come full circle to the Vedic age, in which all wisdom was the privilege of the seers of India.  Much of the charisma had worn thin towards the closing years of his life.  The Chinese attack rudely awakened the people to the harsh reality that they had been living in a world of make-believe.  Nevertheless when Nehru passed away, he still, enjoyed in the minds and hearts of the Indian people a place which few before him have had ---and few ever will.”                    

                                                                                   

14^TH November 2019                                                       ------G. R. Kanwal    

REMEMBERING SRI GURU NANAK DEV JI

                             REMEMBERING SRI GURU NANAK DEV JI      

             

Born on 15^th April 1469 in a village called Rai Bhoi Ki Talvandi, Sri Guru Nanak Dev JI completed his spiritual journey to this world on 22^nd September 1539.  His last resting place was Gurdwara Darbar Sahib Kartar Pur.  Both Talvandi and Kartar Pur are now parts of present day Punjab of Pakistan.

 On the 550^th birthday (12^th November 2019) of Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji it is imperative to recall his universal and eternal teachings and place them before the people at large.

In his message on this sacred occasion Capt. Amarinder Singh. Chief Minister of Punjab, said: “As we celebrate the 550^th Prakash Purab of Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji, it is our humble endeavour to disseminate the ideology of Baba Nanak across the world.  It is my strong belief that Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji’s philosophy is the key to the creation of a harmonious society based on the ethos of Tolerance, Peace, Communal Harmony, Women Empowerment and Protecction of Natural Resources.”

According to World Punjabi Organisation, Nanak Shah Fakir was Hindu Ka Guru, Musalman Ka Pir. He preached oneness of God, humility, simplicity, humanity, integrity, truthfulness and secularism. His ideology stood for dispelling of rituals, imbibing of moral values, working hard, sharing earnings, trusting God, respecting women, practicing humanity and compassion and preserving environment.

In his book Guru Nanak Bani (Published by National Book Trust, India),  Bhai Jodh Singh,  says Guru Nanak Devji emphasized equal opportunities, equal access  to sources and resources, equal participation in decision making, equal rights, egalitarianism, equitability and social justice for the marginal, disadvantaged, deprived and exploited ones because he believes in :One God”.

History says that in 1475, during his stay in Sultanpur, Guru Nanak Dev Ji went to a nearby river every morning in order to bathe and meditate. One fine day, he went to the river as usual but did not return for three days.  It is believed that he went deep inside the forest and stayed there for three days. When he returned, he looked like a man possessed and did not utter a word. When he finally spoke, he said, “There is no Hindu and no Musalman.” These words were the starting point of his teachings which culminated in the formation of Sikhism, the fifth great religion of the world.

Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji did not believe in idol worship, casteism, the discrimination between the high and the low. The rituals of the priestly class, the life of inaction and mere contemplation did not appeal to him.  He did not recommend monasticism for leading a spiritual life and himself lived a householder’s life and performed the duties thereof. He however did recommend the repeated chanting of the name of God to have direct access to Him. He asked his followers to be completely free from lust, rage, greed, attachment and conceit.  Exploitation and fraud also had no place in his code of ethics. He saw human salvation in community service, especially to the needy and the distressed.  The idea of the community kitchen (Langar) where people of all sects and religions, the rich and the poor, the mighty and the weak, men and women, sit on the same mats in perfect discipline and share the same food is unique in Sikhism. Food here is not only a means of physical survival, but a symbol of equality and by extension a message for the mind of the eater to liberate Itself from egotistic rubbish of the world.

Finally, here is a synoptic description of God, The True One, as envisioned by Sri Nanak Dev Ji:

 “The True One was in the beginning, the True One was in the primal age,

The True One is now also, O Nanak; the True One also shall be.

By His order bodies are produced; His order cannot be described.

By His order souls are infused into them; by His order greatness is obtained.

By His order men are high or low; by His order they obtain pre-ordained pain or pleasure

By His order some obtain their reward; by His order others must wander in transmigration.

All are subject to His order; none is exempt from it.

He who understands God’s order, O Nanak, is never guilty of egoism.”

God, according to Guru Nanak Dev Ji, is not isolated from his creation. As his contemporary saint poet Kabir Das also says:

“O servant where dost thou seek Me:

Lo, I am beside thee.

I am neither in  temple nor in mosque; I am neither in Kaaba nor in Kailash;

Neither am I rites and ceremonies, nor in Yoga and renunciation.  

If thou are a true seeker, thou shalt at once see Me: thou shalt meet Me in a moment of time.

Kabir says, ‘O Sadhu God is the breath of all breath.’

             It may not be wrong to suggest that Nobel Laureate Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941) wrote the following song in his Gitanjali under the inspiration of the teachings of both Kabir Das and Guru Nanak Dev Ji:

“Leave this chanting and singing and telling of beads! Whom doest thou worship in this lonely dark corner of a temple with doors all shut? Open thine eyes and see thy God is not before thee!

He is there where the tiller is tilling the hard ground and where the path-maker is breaking stones. He is with them in sun and in shower, and his garment is covered with dust.  Put off thy holy mantle and even like him come down on the dusty soil!

Deliverance? Where is this deliverance to be found? Our master himself has joyfully taken upon him the bonds of creation; he is bound with us all for ever.

Come out of thy meditations and leave aside thy flowers and incense! What harm is there if thy clothes become tattered and stained? Meet him and stand by him in toil and in sweat of thy brow”

                        As post script, let me add that Sri Guru Nanak Dev Ji had firsthand knowledge of people, their places, practices and performances.  He had travelled on foot as far as Sri Lanka, the terrains of the Himalayas, Mecca and most parts of the Middle East. A born mystic poet of a very high order, 976 hymns out of the 5894 incorporated in The Sri Guru Granth Sahib, were composed by him.  He used the language which could be easily understood by one and all. For evidence, just look at the Mool Mantra of Japji Sahib which reads like this: Ek Onkar, Om Sat Naam, Kartaa Purakh, Nirbhau, Nirvair, Akaal Moorat, Ajuni, Saibangh, and Gurparsaad.  Its English version would be as follows: The One, the Reality, Of Name ever True and Eternal, The Prime Doer, the Creator, Fearless, Without Enmity, Of Eternal Form, Without Birth, Uncaused, Self-existent and Self-illuminating, Known by the Grace of the Enlightened  Teacher.        

.                                                                                       -------G. R. KANWAL                                                                                                                      12^th November 2019