IN SEARCH OF OUR WONDERFUL WORDS

By Pramod Kumar Sharma

The societies can never be creative. The battle to create wisdom for his benefit the man has to fight alone. However, this is only a powerful hypothesis based on the history of mankind, which needs not only pondering over, but also experimentation and investigation for its future use.
Even if the man is able to create the wisdom, often, nothing changes. A wisdom that is idle is like a currency that is not in circulation. What do we do with all the wisdom that exists in our scriptures?
Even if we leave aside our scriptures for whatever reasons, do we seriously try to mould our conduct according to the wisdom we ourselves might have created with a view to verifying its workability? Perhaps, we never did it. There is no element of wonder in our relationship with our surroundings. Maybe, we have to infuse the element of wonder in our relationship with the societies we are a part of.
If we had ever tried to conduct ourselves according to the wisdom available from wherever, we would have felt the dire need to seek support of fellow human beings in our efforts to verify the usefulness of wisdom for the mankind. The history of the mankind has proved that the wisdom always percolates down the layers of the humanity to refine itself through the individual efforts of many. Whenever the need of collective efforts surfaces; the need of wonderful words appears.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Notion Press
• Release date: Feb 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9789384878467

Book preview

In Search of Our

Wonderful Words

Promod Kumar Sharma

Notion Press

5 Muthu Kalathy Street, Triplicane,

Chennai - 600 005

First Published by Notion Press 2015

Copyright © Promod Kumar Sharma 2015

All Rights Reserved.

ISBN: 978-93-84878-46-7

This book has been published in good faith that the work of the author is original. All efforts have been taken to make the material error-free. However, the author and the publisher disclaim the responsibility.

No part of this book may be used, reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the author, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

AUTHOR’S SUBMISSION

We do not know everything about what we speak and the listener does not understand everything about what we intend to express through our words. This is one of the few things I have experienced and learned in my life. Maybe we can learn to speak exactly what we intend to and also learn to help the listener to fully understand what we speak. This very thought encouraged me to write this book with enough confidence that as human beings we have enormous ability to learn. We can even, if we want, identify the right path that leads us to the right destination of our life’s journey. Our life’s journey, our thoughts, our actions and our expressions influence each other.

Our intellect helps us in knowing only the half truths and weaving only half philosophies to guide us. Our conduct and expressions have always been able to cultivate a meaningful togetherness of the mankind. The synergy acquired because of such togetherness may compensate for many of the limitations of our individual intellectual processes.

Man’s spiritual growth is difficult without his right intellectual growth. We are generally made to believe that this world is an obstacle in the process of our spiritual growth. This book, at times deductively, but more often unintentionally, reveals that this world, which we cannot escape from, is the obvious medium we can use for our intellectual and spiritual growth.

Ancient Indian philosophy has clearly and categorically stated that the birth of a living being as human beings is essential for attaining Moksha (emancipation); which is said to be the state of eternal happiness, peace and completeness. This implies that for attaining Moksha one has to complete his apprenticeship as a human being with qualifying marks. Serving the world selflessly and not harming anything that exists in the universe could be of much help to the mankind in securing those qualifying marks; this is the hypothesis that has always been close to my mind.

Our words express our thoughts and the conduct. The thoughts cannot be evolved, formed, structured, merged or annihilated without making proper use of the words. The real or notional expressions of man’s individual and collective thoughts, efforts and struggles in his life are through his words only. That was perhaps the reason why I, incidentally, decided to weave my thoughts and ideas around the theme of ‘wonderful words’. This book hardly has anything to do with some kind of ‘art of speaking’; it deals with man’s relationship with his surroundings.

I have permitted my ideas to flow in this book, just as they actually might have occurred to me at different points of time and different occasions in my life in response to varying circumstances and stimulants. I have deliberately avoided being very structured. This I did to facilitate my readers to think without being influenced by any inferences that might have appeared to have been drawn without my intending to do so. Similarly, in my book, I have tried to avoid burdening my readers with many definitions or explanations of the right and the righteous. However, it has always been difficult for me to shift my focus away from the humanity. That could have compelled me to repeat or restate some facts about human life that might have appeared to me relevant in different contexts, remotely or closely related or, at times, even unrelated. The readers may read this book chapter by chapter, allowing their thought to flow; agreeing with me or contradicting me; and forming their own thoughts. In the end, if they are able to form their own views; I will be satisfied.

We know that the truth and wisdom had never been anybody’s personal property. In modern times when lots of information is freely and easily available people often rely on their personal philosophies which are generally notional or based on the information available to them. We also know that information had never been a substitute for wisdom or practical truth. I have only tried to provide some narrative of my thoughts and related information to enable my readers to use them as a food for their thoughts. I am relying on the possibility of my readers contemplating over my ideas and imbibing some of it in their personal philosophies with a view to verifying them for their usefulness. This may also happen that some elements of my thoughts are already well known to many of my readers but in different contexts. In that case readers may be facilitated to evaluate applicability of those thoughts in the context I have presented them. There could be many permutations and combinations of different possibilities, but they all lead to one conclusion, that is, in modern times when readers, themselves possess a great deal of information and knowledge, the best a writer can do is to present his views with utmost honesty and welcome his readers to evolve new thoughts or modify the existing ones.

I am aware that my role does not end after sharing my words with my readers. In fact, it binds me with a duty to contribute further in modification and growth of thoughts for the benefit of the mankind, and to whatever efforts my readers or others make for that purpose.

In the end I beg to submit that, like many others, I also believe that mere thoughts, unless backed by appropriate and selfless conduct to nurture those thoughts, have little or no value. Please also permit me to say that as human beings we can only infer, not conclude.

Promod Kumar Sharma

22nd October, 2014

Contents

Title

Copyright

Author’s Submission

1. Those Words!

2. Our Words

3. Thought of The God

4. Absence of Nothingness

5. Simplicity

6. Patience

7. Compassion

8. The Culture of Duty

9. Target Beauty, Not Happiness

10. Spiritual Growth

11. Thoughts and Conduct

12. Creativity Through Service

13. Life is Neither a Fun Nor a Drudgery

14. Ideal, Man’s Half Brother

15. Speaking

16. Harmless Words-Our Duty

17. Wonderful Words-Our Role

1

THOSE WORDS!

---

The year was 1974. I was 24 years old then and was in my first job in Pune. I was travelling from Pune to Mumbai by Deccan Queen. I occupied a window side seat. Opposite me a gentleman roughly twenty years elder to me sat. We had kept the windows open enjoying the touch and push of wind that blew and the scenic beauty of the hilly area. My habit of speaking very less and the age difference between two of us could not permit an exchange of even a single word between the two of us. However, that was not to be.

He took out a small packet of his bag and opened it. He had in mind to eat something but the wind we were enjoying till then threatened to cause some trouble. I immediately pulled down the glass pane of the window by my side. I noticed that the trouble was not yet over for him and for his food packet due to the wind entering from the window by his side. I, almost instinctively, got up and pulled down the other window pan that was on his side. He was comfortable and I was satisfied. He looked at me and said, Your concern has impressed me. God bless you.

I do not remember how I responded to his words, but I never forgot those words from then on. Those words elevated me on many occasions including those when my own self had been unkind to me. Those words helped me to preserve my self-esteem even when I did not conform to the ways of the world around me; and it happened in my life at a frequency that far exceeded the normal. Those words had been like an oral certificate granted to me that helped me to clear many tests that my life offered to me; circumstantially, due to my own faults or otherwise.

I do not remember anything about the outward appears of that gentleman. The only additional thing that I remember about him is that he, perhaps, very softly had said ‘Good Bye’ or some such thing when Deccan Queen reached Mumbai (we called it Bombay then). I do distinctly remember the words he had spoken on the train, which became more and more important to me following the pattern of my personal growth. At some point of time, I asked myself whether I could have spoken those words in similar circumstances; and if I could not, then why?

My attention got shifted from ‘the listener’, that was me, towards ‘the speaker’, that was the unknown gentleman. The unknown gentleman, in a way, became an important milestone from where I started thinking about how to make a good use of my ability to speak that the nature had granted me without even asking for it. It turned out that things were not at all simple. I came to know, how unprepared I was for any step that I took in this direction. Sometimes I even thought that I was learning about many things except speaking. I did not give up; and learned an important lesson of my life, that was; there are no short cuts in the path of learning.

Forty years had not been a small period. The most of it was kind of an investment that I had been making leading a life like anybody else in this world. It had been a rich experience. Why not share it with others?I thought, and here is this book.

I do not know when and how the idea of ‘how to speak’ got completely submerged in a sea of questions like, ‘Why to speak?’, ‘What to speak?’, ‘When to speak?’, ‘What not to speak?’, ‘Do we have anything worth expressing?’, ‘Why should we express?’, ‘How do we come to know that we have grown enough to express something?’, ‘Can our ability to express add to the quality of our individual lives and the life of the entire human race?’ and so on and so forth.

2

OUR WORDS

---

Like all ordinary human beings, we live with other human beings, not away from them. We are influenced by the world around us by seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting, feeling, experiencing and thinking analytically. The most effective and common method for communicating with the world we adopt is, expressing ourselves by speaking. Speaking is a very natural activity for us. It is like walking with our legs or lifting a book by using our hands. We do not generally find anything awkward in the way we speak. It is only when we listen to others, see others walk or see others lift a book we make comments that many a times are not kind enough.

This book is not about learning some mannerisms or etiquettes about speaking to convince a prospective customer to buy a product that he does not need or creating an excellent impression on an interview board to get a job one cannot handle. We know such things do not work; in fact, often turn out to be counterproductive even for ‘accomplished’ speakers. It is also not about making best possible use of our faculty of speech to lead a life that is in conformity with the ways of the world we live in and, perhaps fairly acceptable to most of the others who may be close to us.

You will agree that it is far better to have a glowing face blessed with a natural half smile than to ‘look smiling’ with the help of an expert plastic surgeon. Perhaps, this book deals with something like a natural half smile. A natural half smile cannot be brought about by making some efforts or using some techniques. It can appear only if and when we are able to erase all traces of pretentious smiles from our faces.

The problem with most of us is that we take things for granted until we get into some trouble. We own a very sophisticated system of a body with senses, mind, intellect and ego (I am-ness). We have developed a language for understanding, thinking about and describing; to ourselves or to the others; objects or phenomena that we experience. We human beings can pool in information, knowledge and wisdom we have acquired; and can also pool in our efforts to accomplish things that make our lives vastly superior in some ways to the other living beings existing on this earth. No doubt, we are great in many ways.

The other picture is also not small. Our earth revolves around our sun at a distance of about 149.6 million kilometers. There are about 40,000 billions of suns in the universe. Even on our planet earth, eagles can see farther than us, bats can hear better than us and a blue whale weighs about 2660 times than us. The reality is that although we are the most intelligent beings on this earth, but our earth in itself is virtually insignificant when compared with the universe. To cap it, we can individually die any moment when our times come or a small accident in the cosmos can result into shifting of the earth nearer to sun to roast us at 1000 degrees centigrade.

What an insignificant entity like us can communicate with another insignificant entity, in a language that can express almost anything? Can it be anything else except that we are concerned about each other and let us live together until we are alive?

Am I instilling a sense of fear in the minds of my readers? To this, I will only say that inadequacy or fear always precedes a realization

Reviews for IN SEARCH OF OUR WONDERFUL WORDS

[vaishnokasodhan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

“In Search of Our Wonderful Words” helped me to view the larger picture of life.


Yes, I think we waste major part of our lives in trying to earn the extra money to buy pain. No doubt, it is impossible to lead a life that has no pain; but, why should one mindlessly try to earn an extra buck to buy some extra pain?


The book discusses basic issues that we hardly think about. For instance, where the extra buck that we make to buy pain, come from? Doesn’t it come from someone else’s pocket that is weaker than us? Is it not true that in the process of trying to make ourselves happy we make others unhappy; and, we together, live unhappily thereafter?


The book does not try to prove a point; that no one should try to do it, considering the complexities of modern life; but, it raises a valid point, perhaps many points, that are equally valid. The author attempts to make the reader think for himself if the solution lies in thinking rightly, conducting accordingly and then trying to learn as to how to communicate with others urging them to make a joint effort to effect a change in the right direction. Nowhere the author says that it is easy. He says, “It is not impossible, provided we learn to be concerned about each other.”


The great thing about the book is that it is not an intellectual effort based on poor and mistaken assumptions to tell the reader to go to the left or to the right. He tells the reader to align his intellect with the universal intelligence of surviving purposefully for the others and meaningfully for self.

The modern world needs books like this one; this alone, makes it a 5-STAR book.


VAISHNO KASODHAN

[Kalpana · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

The Book thoughtfully inspires.
With the help of simple logical thoughts the book tries to inspire the readers not only to lead a meaningful life for themselves, but also work towards making the lives of others also more meaningful and satisfying. It emphasizes that selfless service becomes more purposeful only if the beneficiary is also inspired to serve selflessly.
Nowhere in the book had the author seemed to have argued that religion and spirituality are the starting points of personal growth; instead he picked up straightforward humanitarian principles and discussed how such principles, if followed in real earnest, could enhance the quality of human life.
The book attaches much importance to efforts that are necessary for creating a just and caring society that honours human existence without distinction and discrimination. The book has great depth, but to achieve that the author has adopted the route of simplifying.
The book deserves more than 95 out of 100; hence it is rated as a Five Star Book.
Kalpana