Dear Friends:
Today is the time to narrate you briefly a simple and small story from Mahabharata, the great epic of India. Kagola was sincere and devout person but with limited intelligent. His son was Ashtavakra ( twisted in eight places- physically handicapped) who got twisted in womb when Father Kagola made mistakes, while reciting Vedas. Kagola married Sujata who was daughter of Uddalaka, the great master. For more details read:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtavakra
Ashtavakra defeated Vandi, main Guru of Raja Janak and took revenge for injustice done to his Father.
The moral of this Mahabharata story taken from the book by Chakravarty Rajagopalachari is:
A son (child) need not be like his Father. A father who is physically weak may have a strong son and an ignorant father may have a scholarly and intelligent son. And vice-versa.
Secondly, it is wrong to assess the greatness of a person based on his physical appearance or age. External appearances are deceptive.
Therefore, as Kahlil Gibran and Shakespeare and our own 'Natsamrat' says your children are not your children. Do not take undue pride or blame for the success or failure of your children in life. One can of course derive satisfaction from the fact that we did our best to provide him/her the amenities to the best of one's earning capacity and spent quality time with them.
Also, the child can not blame the parents for anything except questioning why he was brought in to this world without his prior permission.
I was reminded of this story today because of a discussion with a young person wanting to get married. This person claims we can judge a person by seeing a photograph and obviously I disagreed as usual. The modern psychology to confirms this as well as our great epic.
Today is the time to narrate you briefly a simple and small story from Mahabharata, the great epic of India. Kagola was sincere and devout person but with limited intelligent. His son was Ashtavakra ( twisted in eight places- physically handicapped) who got twisted in womb when Father Kagola made mistakes, while reciting Vedas. Kagola married Sujata who was daughter of Uddalaka, the great master. For more details read:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashtavakra
Ashtavakra defeated Vandi, main Guru of Raja Janak and took revenge for injustice done to his Father.
The moral of this Mahabharata story taken from the book by Chakravarty Rajagopalachari is:
A son (child) need not be like his Father. A father who is physically weak may have a strong son and an ignorant father may have a scholarly and intelligent son. And vice-versa.
Secondly, it is wrong to assess the greatness of a person based on his physical appearance or age. External appearances are deceptive.
Therefore, as Kahlil Gibran and Shakespeare and our own 'Natsamrat' says your children are not your children. Do not take undue pride or blame for the success or failure of your children in life. One can of course derive satisfaction from the fact that we did our best to provide him/her the amenities to the best of one's earning capacity and spent quality time with them.
Also, the child can not blame the parents for anything except questioning why he was brought in to this world without his prior permission.
I was reminded of this story today because of a discussion with a young person wanting to get married. This person claims we can judge a person by seeing a photograph and obviously I disagreed as usual. The modern psychology to confirms this as well as our great epic.
David Lewis, British Psychologist has demonstrated with examples how we make mistake of judging people purely based on photograph or some times very few clues.
The only way is face to face meeting with an open mind. This meeting is the only source to get reliable data to make a good decision. This meeting is the foundation of the structure of our future relationship with that person. Here, I am strongly reminded of a memorable scene in the film 'English Vinglish' where Sri Devi makes that wonderful speech at the end of the movie raising a toast to the happiness of newly married couple. Do you?
I hope each one of us makes own research and frames appropriate questions in order to make an informed choice.
This applies in all our relationships within family or in business too. Implementing this can be a good way to start a new year. The problem is we are discarding our great epics without examining them and acting blindly. Throwing away baby with bath water.
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