Swami Vijnananand: Efforts for the new generation..

A famous quote says ‘if you want one year of prosperity, grow grain. If you want ten years of prosperity grow trees; but, if you want hundreds of years of prosperity, nurture the youths’. Efficient and morality practicing young generation is important and necessary aspect in nation building. 

Statistics reveal that presently; India has 50% of its total population below the age of 20 years and about 70% or more below the age of 35 years. Therefore India is known as nation of youths in the world. India is predicted to be a world superpower in next 10 to 15 years. Realization of this dream is largely based on the assumed success and accomplishment of young generation. Thus, we can conclude that if India or any nation for that matter, wants to gain and maintain top position in the world in coming years, it is necessary to start and continue the process of creating capable, virtuous and patriotic young generation.  

 

Educational institutions, office bearers, principals, teachers, parents, government officials, politicians responsible for educational policy making – all should consider this fact before planning and implementing a strategy. Manashakti Research Centre particularly and especially is working with this purpose. Its objective is to help parents, teachers and others concerned in nurturing young generation. With this objective, it is busy organizing many study camps and related activities regularly for past many years. Recently a three days conference was organized at Lonavla on the subject “Efforts required to bring up the new generation with right character.”

Pursuit of happiness

Each one of us mostly strives for happiness and happiness is the major objective. Parents attempt to fill their child’s world with happiness. They always try hard to raise their child properly and keep his or her life on correct track. But mostly they are ignorant about the exact course of action to achieve their aim and often their efforts result   not yielding desired results; end-up into failure. To some extent; this is applicable to schools and teachers also.

If we review the condition and status of children – from infants to teenagers - the overall state of affairs we see is quite worrying.  9^th June 2010 edition of English daily published from Mumbai displayed following headlines on front page:

-         Two and half year old child suffers from depression.

-         A rich Kid steals……just for the craze of thrill

We see quite often the news related to the stress, depression and  resulting ill effects due to the erratic behavior in younger generation.

Today we can easily hear about depression among six to ten years old children. High blood pressure, diabetes is common in school and college students, at least during the pre-exam period of high tension, as revealed in some social surveys published. Another published survey revealed that 50% school students in a metropolitan city were of aggressive nature and show tendency to become a gang member of bad boys operating in school campus.

Tough competition; tension of study; increasing struggle due to ambition of getting maximum marks; addiction of TV, mobile phones, social media and Internet games; excessive / untimely eating and sleeping; exam fear; getting confused at the time of exam; anger;  unwillingness to attend school; self-centered nature; lack of definite pre-set goal – 

complaints coming from parents are many and never-ending. 

On one side tensed parents are worried about future of children, on the other side; children are getting depressed and aggressive due to various external factors. Dynamic lifestyle has provided us many conveniences that we had never seen before. But it has also given birth to worries and sorrows that were never present in our life in the past.

Where Is Happiness?

Matthieu Ricard is a French scientist turned Buddhist monk. He has reputation of being ‘happiest person in the world’. He has published a book on ‘happiness’. He says that our mind is flexible and constantly changing. We can dramatically change our life, if we slightly change our attitude toward world and our perception of external things.

How to execute these changes? What exactly we should repair? To find the answers we must entirely review the concept of happiness.

Happy Personality

In some of the earlier blog-articles; we have seen how the concept of happiness has been treated by Swamiji in terms of laws of motion and second law of thermodynamics, Entropy. Here we shall try to see this in another rational way.

Anybody who really wants to be happy in life needs three things. They are:

1.     Capacity to earn money for material comforts – This requires Success in examinations.

2.     Physical fitness – This requires maintaining sound health.

3.     Peace and satisfaction – This requires appropriate behavior, nature or character.

It is always beneficial to strive for them since the onset. Let’s try to understand it in brief:

1.     Success in Examination: One has to pass many exams with flying colors since childhood to young age and even later in life. Syllabus, Passing criteria and competition is part and parcel of every examination. We need to study various things with devotion, honesty, concentration and persistence. You have to prove your worth gradually by passing examination. Our financial and other gains are determined according to this. Currently this process continues from two and half / three years to twenty five years of age. Many career options are present as per one’s interests and caliber. We can choose from them. Even after completing academic studies, one has to face many examinations and competition such as in job interview, promotion or while starting new business. At each stage one has to ensure correct efforts and decisions for further progress. One can earn wealth after all these efforts. In short,  success in the examination is most necessary.

Health: A person cannot be happy without excellent physical health because only healthy and sound person is capable of enjoying all the pleasure we get from wealth. For instance, a person might have financial capacity to eat tasty sweets every day. But if he has diabetes, he is absolutely forbidden to do so. We cannot enjoy any pleasure without health. Our body is made of many organs, cells and various systems (such as digestive system, respiratory system, etc.). Their complicated functioning needs proper balance and sound health of each body component which is important for day to day activities. So a person must include well-planned and controlled diet, recreation, rest and exercise in his lifestyle. Parents must consciously take care and lay foundation of child’s health since childhood. Today health care is a matter of big concern. Many physical and psychological illnesses of adult age are arriving early at young age on large scale due to faulty lifestyle and food habits.

3       Nature or Character: These two factors mentioned above, i.e. success in examination and health might be favorable to a person, but no one can be happy without appropriate nature (behavior). Negative, unsatisfied, egoistic, vain person remains unsatisfied and unhappy in spite of favorable conditions. On the other hand, person having appropriate character, nature can reduce his unhappiness by remaining balanced even during adverse health and wealth conditions. Nature of a person means attitude, motivation, tendencies, behavior and character. All these things are important and essential for happiness. Therefore cultivating, nurturing proper nature, building character plays very important role in creating new young generation to face life challenges in the years to come. In fact it may not be wrong to conclude that while the first two factors are important, this third factor is vitally more important.

Character building

Character building by increasing emotional quotient is a hot topic of discussion among thinkers in the world today. An international conference on ‘Educating world citizens for the 21^st century’ was held in October 2009 at Washington, USA, under leadership of Dalai Lama. This important issue is at the center of discussion amongst thinkers all over world. The process of developing nature and character mainly takes place in childhood, i.e. up till age of 12 to 14 years. To accomplish proper things in this process, parents and teachers can contribute on large scale and media and government can also play their proper role. It is necessary to create awareness and give training in this regard. Many experts have presented their viewpoint on this aspect in the recently held Manashakti conference also. 
(The conference details at link 'http://educon.manashakti.org/20-Jan17.html')

In prevailing education system emphasize is put on scoring the marks and grades in examination. Curriculum and training regarding focus on health and character building attracts very less attention or is completely ignored. This aspect assumes high importance in MANASHAKTI efforts in nurturing youth. We shall see more on this in the articles to follow.

With due emphasis on Character Development, we have to prepare the revised-new rational education policy to nurture the overall personality (i.e. success in examination, health and character) of the child during the journey form prenatal stage to youth.We should take into account advantages and disadvantages of current education system to find out appropriate solutions and plug the loopholes. For doing this we need co-operation from all concerned. While determining these details of action; we should first objectively review when, where, how and by what means the learning process takes place in the life of child. So we could understand how to make that process more favorable and appropriate. The subject was discussed in its basics by Swamiji in his book “Save Your Child from Yourself”.

We shall review this; in the article to follow.

 

Vijay R. Joshi.