Saturday, June 04, 2005

Learn to Tolerate - Swami Vivekananda


During his speech in Chicago, back in 1983, Swami Vivekananda shared his wonderful ideas about religions and the tolerance that we should practice in our life. People who believe in any particular religion generally will have the feeling that what they believe and worship is the right and all others are doing sin against god. He asked us whether we interpret the children's behavior as sins! We are grown up and behave and think in many better ways than a kid can. Does this mean that the kids are not doing well? According to Vivekananda, religions always aim to reach perfection. When believers of a particular religion possess better practices, they should not blame other religions. And blaming others is not a sign of growth. It shows that we are immature. We should be able to tolerate.

I would like to extend his thought not only to religious belief, but to my whole life. If we watch carefully, we can see a lot of intolerance in our daily life activities. Suppose you are walking through a busy street and if anyone accidentally hit you. How do you behave then? Most of the victims will curse the other one, or make a scene or at least stare each other for a while. But nobody thinks that the next time it may be he/her who will be in the other side. Just think of a guy or gal who got his/her vehicle turned off while trying to get out off traffic. The vehicles behind the victim will immediately start blowing their horns like anything which creates an irritating scene. It is like they believe the will be able to remove the vehicle or who ever creates the obstruction in front, by blowing horns! The final result will be like the poor victim will be more frantic and in hurry he/she takes more time to get the vehicle started and move forward.

India is a nation where a people who belongs to many religions exist. Day by day the frictions between different believers are increasing. It’s high time we should practice tolerance. And I believe that we should practice tolerance towards others from these very small incidences, which may last for only a few seconds or minutes in our life. A small drop of water creates the ocean. We won't be able to tolerate other religions unless we are able to tolerate this kind of small incidence.

3 comments:

  1. So true. Thank you for sharing this.

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  2. gud post ya....couldnt keep me upto date with ur blogs....XAAAAMMM FEVER was oN!

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  3. Dear Anonymous reader, Thank you very much for hearing the article and leaving the comments. I visited gitananda.org.

    --Deepu George V

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