A former high school teacher and an educator, a passionate reader, a published poet and a writer, an ardent nature lover, I am also fond of good, soft music. Amazon link for my books: goo.gl/X1NEFf
The light of my study lamp Often blinds me, turns celestial It lifts me, carries me away Into the world of extreme elation Far from earthly existence Floating effortlessly, higher and higher As if impelled by a light bright, Feeling like a liberated kite! Guided by a heavenly whisper A soft, luscious unheard voice Fascinated by the aura of sounds Enchanted by the exuberance of colors Confounded by the abstract beauty I experience a strange sensation A message resounds all around Happiness is not elusive. I return to my study, My safe haven The light of my lamp Glows brighter, bemused I ruminate
I try to reflect… a sound reverberates I can hear various distant shots My selfish thoughts veer around myself They are far…I am safe!
You can click on Sublime Shadows of Life by Balroop Singh to read more such poems. If you have liked this poem, please share it at your favorite social networks. Thank you for your support. Please share your valuable comments, they are much appreciated.
I have already written about arrogance and how it can be harmful for us. If you haven’t read those posts and want to start from the beginning, you can click on the following links:
Arrogance becomes detrimental when we accept it as an essential part of our personality. Can arrogance be divested? It may be quite challenging but not impossible.
ARROGANCE…the word that conjures up negative images, the word whose connotation is often misconstrued, the word, which scares us without even touching us!
My experiences with arrogance have taught me some profound lessons. The day I tried to break it into small pieces and deal with it syllable by syllable, this is what I discovered:
We can turn it around into a positive word:
That is how you can revert arrogance, which is very much in your own hands.
Nobody except the arrogant can change himself or herself.
Only our inner voice can impel us towards change. When an arrogant person decides to develop humility, he or she has to overcome self-perpetuated attitude of being supreme.
It is the ego, which accentuates arrogance. When we recognize the power of self-effacement, we can accomplish a positive change in our personalities. Often we don’t make any such effort. We get so accustomed to riding the high sea that it carries us far into the realms of selfishness.
The solution lies in dropping the sails and anchoring our conceit.
Acceptance and respectare the two key words for exorcising the demonic powers of arrogance. When we start respecting others as equal human beings with same kinds of desires and emotions, when we start understanding that they too have a tender heart and get hurt by our outbursts, we begin to comprehend the subtle influence of being compassionate.
Compassion comes very slowly and only if we decide to expunge egotistical traits, which dominate arrogance.
The roots of arrogance lie elsewhere, probably in childhood or upbringing and therefore it is very essential to visit those corridors and make peace with those experiences, which are no longer relevant.
If you didn’t receive love and care in your childhood, you can’t bridge that gap now, if you crave for certain moments to return to soothe your soul, they can’t. If you were bullied and you are hiding behind arrogance to cover it up, you have to break that shell and come out.
We can embellish our personality at any stage of our life.
Read more about personality enhancement in my book.
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Thank you for reading this. Please add your valuable comments, they are much appreciated.
Like fragrant flowers under our feet
Like diaphanous drops of first rain
Like moonlight soothing our eyes
Like water boats floated with childlike charm
Dreams remain our precious possessions.
Dreams gently caress us, carry us along
Awaken us out of their magic
Sometimes, stimulate us into activity
Encourage us to embark on the journey
To make a beginning, to plod on
Dreams are those concepts, those desires
Which remain deeply entrenched in us
Till we work on those images of mind
Flow in their current, shield them
From stormy waters… love them!
Dreams ignite a fire within us
A fire of reality, of confidence, of success
They push us into the life of adventure,
To rush, to explore, to accomplish
They steer us towards our goal
I have always been deeply disturbed by intolerance and wanted to write about it but I have always turned my face the other way, trying to avoid it, knowing well how deep-rooted this sentiment is and how less I know about it.
I have tried to understand it in my own limited arena, how it develops and gets aggravated within the families before it spills out onto the streets.
Quite early in life, I had my first encounter with this emotion albeit I had no idea that people call it intolerance and it is so widespread! With the passage of time I learnt that intolerance is the refusal to accept, appreciate and respect the views, beliefs or behavior of a person or a social group.
I also learnt that we are not born with intolerance. Children are too innocent to understand the depth of this term, which is defined for them by their parents, environment and the society in which they are raised.
So it is a learned behavior. It is most often trigged by fear or insecurity that people face in their immediate environment.
It is a universal phenomenon…in some societies it is camouflaged under empathy and help that leaders try to offer, only to exploit it for their own benefits, which could be political, religious or related to caste and color.
Mahatma Gandhi felt, “Intolerance is itself a form of violence and an obstacle to the growth of a true democratic spirit.”
We inflict this violence on each other, without caring for the emotional hurts it causes especially on young adolescents who have to deal with it in educational institutions and neighborhood.
Role of families: As a child, whenever I visited my grandmother’s home, I saw a weird form of intolerance towards the working class, who could not mingle with the landlord families, had to sit on the floor and eat in their own plates, which had to be kept separate. Feudal masters looked down upon them just because they were poor and worked in their fields.
It is quite obvious that the children of such houses would grow up with the feeling that this kind of behavior was right and that is how it got embedded in social set up. It could never be rooted out despite the best of opportunities and laws. It still exists in a veiled form because certain people refuse to accept the underprivileged and the downtrodden as their equal. They share their beliefs and opinions with their children in their own narrow-minded way and the vicious circle continues.
Role of groups: There are fanatics who want to underline the importance of their own caste, region, race or religion. They create such groups to highlight the superiority of their race or religion. They keep raking the age-old traditions to prove that their ancestors had rightly created the class divide. Their constant endeavor is to sow the seeds of narrow-mindedness in the impressionable minds.
The atrocities of the past, the brutalities, which were inflicted by a certain group of people, are never buried. They are kept alive by talking about them so that the posterity remembers the prejudices, so that the youth can be instigated in the name of never ending vengeance.
Education, awareness and globalization has done little in eradicating intolerance, which is much more deep-rooted than we think. It is associated with the biased views of a parent, a teacher or a leader whose influence on growing children cannot be prevented.
Role of educational institutions: Children who study in minority schools and convents are conditioned to follow a set of rules, which contribute immensely to their development. They may not be told that others are lesser than them but the way their own beliefs, principles and philosophies are drilled, do create a subtle feeling of superiority for their own group.
Some of those who are confused try to rationalize those beliefs and principles but many more are easily carried away by the radical groups and that is how fringe elements get an impetus to keep themselves active and alive to exploit the sensitive matters.
I have already written about arrogance and how it can be harmful for us. If you haven’t read those posts and want to start from the beginning, you can click on the following links:
That is how you can revert arrogance, which is very much in your own hands.
Emotional Shadows 