I received a rosary from a priest last Sunday. Touching a few beads ,I gave them each a name.  I called the first bead, ‘Love’. The bead whispered, ‘Converge Love and Diverge Love’. There is a story of a seeker who wept openly at the mere sight of a hill,a mountain a flower or a river. One day someone asked him  “Why do you cry?”

He replied:” Looking at these icons of nature I hear a voice which says, ‘Do not be thankless! ‘ You have forgotten the creator of the universe. This rattles my soul and so I weep”. That call for the universe is beautiful and we are lucky to be part of it.

Love binds us with silken threads. We get bonded; we get linked with people whom we love. Love unites us. By loving the supreme, you are united with Him, for you will feel God’s presence within you and around you. When you love God, you will learn to love others and your life will be built on the foundation of love.

I called the second bead ‘Humility’. It says: “Give up Pride.” Just as eating food and drinking water are necessary for living, it is necessary to practice humility. One has to pay a price for being egoistic.

How foolish is to say, “I did this, I did that! “This  ‘ego-intoxication’ must -go! For what am ‘I’ but a flickering candle that at the dawn will die!

The third bead is ‘Peace’. It says: “Don’t be angry. Keep you cool.” Anger  is harmful. One mother got angry because her child was troubling her while she was working. She admonished the child, but the child continued to play mischief. The enraged mother  picked up the child and threw him down. Every headless act is sinful but there is much more irrationality in anger.

With love, humility and peaceful disposition, your path can only become more pleasant and less difficult.

We have been noticing a rapid rise in the graph of literacy rate, but it is a fact that corruption, terrorism and crimes have also increased with the same rate or probably higher. It is generally believed that an educated man has more intellectual power and he is ethically better than a layman. But then isn’t it strange that a place having a large number of literate people has equal number of evils too. Yes this is where our modern education fails. Our modern education system has produced a vast population able to read but unable to distinguish what is worth reading.

If we don’t know the value and ethics of life then what’s the use of collecting degrees. You will be surprised to know that most of the criminals, chain-snatchers etc. are highly educated. Another example which i would like to tell you is an incident where four B.tech graduates took away the life of that woman who gave them life and the reason was a mere superstition. They believed that some wicked power was inside their mother’s body. How deplorable it is! Despite having good qualification, they were not literate enough to distinguish between right and wrong. It is definitely the fault of our modern education system that we only get bookish knowledge. As a formality, value education, environmental studies etc. are being included in our syllabus but we all know neither the teachers nor the students take interest in these subjects.

All these statements are sufficient enough to put a big question mark on our modern education and by the way, we are debating this topic itself shows that education is lacking its value in some or the other way. In the end, I just want to repeat the words of Adam Cooper, “You don’t need any highbrows traditions or money to really learn, you just need people with the desire to better themselves.“