Success and Self-Responsibility

Khumukcham Angamba Singh
Asst.Professor, Don Bosco College Maram, Manipur

Whatever we do, our prime goal is to have a decent and employable life. It is not easy for doing well and excel in life. Each one of us is responsible for our own lives; we have to empower ourselves to be happy and optimistic. It is the simple truth that how we spend our time replicates and mirrors as to how we spend our lives. Everybody expects a continuous and genuine happy life.

The actual meaning of education is to bring out the inner qualities to enable and to allow the flowering of dormant, hidden virtues to their full glory. Today education is generally understood to give intellectual, moral and social instruction. But unfortunately, education, as imparted today touches only the intellectual aspects, such as the ability to repeat what has been read. There is no co-relation of knowledge so gained with everyday practice. The crystal clear example is when we get up in the early morning and read the newspapers we will find a number of inhuman very wild actions like rapping, killing and many extortions. Yes, there may be many reasons but the ultimate cause is lack of knowledge, failure of the education system.

The fact remains that the expansion of knowledge and its transfer to everybody are unstoppable. Today knowledge is not being handed out to the few, in small stages, through a process of communication, it is passed on to a large number of people in undigestible quantities and in an unintegrated and even mind disturbing fashion. There is a very important conclusion arrived in a survey of intelligence quotient, when a highly educated class of people become the tyrant and are prone to commit the most brutal atrocities as they do not carry the actual importance and value of education. How to meet this challenge of education is a question, which our young men and women have to answer. They are our future rulers, so they must try, right from now, to find ways and means how to control abuses being practised in the realm of education and also to make sure if the extension of knowledge is desirable or not.

In the old days and, in some cases, even now, there were a few persons, rather only a minor population, who even without formal education command respect and regard on account of their wisdom, an outcome of true education. They achieved this reputation by their own efforts through observation, self-discipline and turning the knowledge thus obtained into wisdom. We would like our young men and women to emulate these few persons, educated without education, and make their education worth its price and labour for which it is acquired. If the knowledge through education is turned into human service, it is desirable to extend the extent of education. If it increases human misery and is used for acts of terrorism and devastation, it must be confined to a very few found fit for it after psychological tests, much less its extension to the huge populace. The danger will not only come from terrorists and their evil doings. Worse threats are held over us by cocksure academicians and scientists, hankering to outdo or undo nature by bizarre creations of their own. What you and we are to do when this activity poses enough threats to set up humanity to think. Wake up to the menace before us and feel your responsibility in creating awareness as to how to stop the menace of abuse of knowledge.

Most of the people believe in God, and say that if not someone else, we must depend on God for help and success. But have they cared to try to know, what God has to tell them? God tells them that good things are not granted but earned, not given as gifts, but come through trials and tribulations; we have to toil for them and suffer for them before they come our way. So we must understand the message of truth in the proverb– Rely only on yourself. God helps those who help themselves. When God has bestowed all blessings on ourselves, then why do we not move our limbs, the blessed ones? I think we all agree that no one can climb the mountain peaks or the stairs of success with his hands in the pocket.

If we depend on somebody, it means we should act according to his bidding or make ourselves his slaves, meaning thereby losing our freedom to act as per our own will, which our soul has achieved after so many incarnations. Self-help is the capacity to stand on one’s own legs, without anybody’s help. The man, with confidence in himself, howsoever small in the eyes of the worldly people, is always bubbling with enthusiasm to come forward and face the dark forces. So, we should keep in mind that self-reliance is the basis of the great and successful acts.

One who is eager to reach the top has to clean the thorny and rough road, and that too, with this own hands. It is saying that “the man who makes everything that leads to happiness depends upon himself, has adopted the best plan for living happily. This is the man of character and wisdom.”