By | Dr Pavan Soni | IIM-B Innovation Evangelist
Can someone please justify (and not explain) what transpired in this school in Pakistan? No one can. Not even the biestly perpetrators of the heinous act!
I have been told since my childhood by my parents and the larger family that –
जो भी होता है अच्छे के लिए होता है ॥
“whatever happens, happens for good”
The same has been fostered throughout the later years of the life too by almost everybody. The problem with this statement is that you can’t argue otherwise. I think this to be the most convenient excuse for when things don’t go as we plan, or worst still, to make sense of our very miserable existence on the face of earth.
Amid this complexity and randomness, we somehow have this tendency to assume and even justify causality, that one event does (and should) lead to another. When I say ‘we’, I mean the eastern civilization.
We seldom realize that there can’t be anyone keeping an account of over seven billion people dwelling on this earth and map the causalities of what leads to what in their lives. I question our age old wisdom on occasions like what happened in Pakistan recently, or in India a few years back, and American a decade ago.
Of course there are those who can justify all of this, and even their own purpose on earth, but for the larger masses who are managing to just lead a dignified life, it’s beyond comprehension and solace.
‘Whatever happens, happens for good’- try explaining this to the parents who lost their children to this bloody massacre! A punishment for sending their children to school. An act where the barbarism takes over civilization. What have we taught these children- a lesson of the lifetime- a lesson of hate and grief.
So the next time somebody tells me ‘whatever happens, happens for good’, I know how timid the person is and how desperate the person is to want me to take my eyes off the chance existence that I have on earth. This very compromise with self and surroundings doesn’t help anybody, least self. This belief and sense of temporary security lets us carry on till another jolt hits us on our head, and once again this adage is there to rescue.
May the little souls rest in peace, and may we never forget the day when the civilization took at leap backward, in fact, got butchered by the barbarics. Only by not forgetting and not getting into the comfort of ‘whatever….’ can we really draw some lessons. The lesson has to be – ‘to act’. Realize the randomness around us, and our chance existence amid all this. Let’s face the reality head on, and try changing it for every bit that is worth it, and not accept it as given, or worst still, bestowed onto us by some ulterior power.
