Good things are not learnt easily

One day we were discussing general things and during the conversation we started talking about the problems faced by the parents and the children. This was realized by everyone involved in the discussion that there are so many good things being done by most of the people including the children but these are not talked much in the public and more discussion takes place related to negative happening in the society. This is true that negative radiations in the environment do not do good to anybody. Then the question arises, why do people discuss more about negative things than the positives around them? Why have we become so much obsessed with negatives? Our great leaders were positive thinkers and that made them to achieve which at times was not expected at all. There are many examples which prove that those who think positive can do unexpected things and they make this world a better place to live for everyone. The father of our nation Mahatma Gandhi, the first prime minister of the country Pt. Nehru, Sardar Vallabh Bhai Patel, Dr. Zakir Hussain, Lala Lajpat Rai, Bal Gangadhar Tilak, Sarojani Naidu, Netaji Subhash Chandra Bose, Chandrashekhar Azad, Sukhdev, Bhagat Singh,Rani Lakshmi Bai,Veer Shivaji, King Krishan Dev, Seth Ghanshyam Das Birla, Lal Bahadur Shastri, Dr. Radhakrishanan, Indira Gandhi, Morarji Desai, Ch. Charan Singh, Ram Manohar Lohia, Baba Ambedkar and many more of their generation and time. If history is visited seriously then the names of the positive thinkers and the leaders will take hundreds of years to write their names only and if we want to write about each one of them this will take thousands of years. The list is quite long and if we think of the recent past and the present generation we have Atal Behari Vajpaai, Pranab Mukharjee,Man Mohan Singh,A K Antony,Sushma Swaraj, APJ Kalam, Nitish Kumar, and many more. Some of you might think that the list of the present time is quite short in comparison to the previous one. I also felt the same while writing and recalling the names which can be compared with the names of our forefathers. This has disturbed me also, but is the situation that critical? The number of the good people and the positive thinkers is not less but because we do not discuss much about them, hence the public memory has only the negatives in their mind. Why is it so and what are the reasons for the same? We can give so many reasons for that, but the main reason is that we are living in an independent India.As the time has changed so have our priorities. Earlier the people were more concerned about the well being of the whole community then it got restricted to the near relatives, then to the family members and now in most of the cases the individuals. Though we are filled with more factual information but are not good enough in the proper knowledge. We are more concerned about self than anybody else. Most people say that if the individuals are happy then the whole society will enjoy. This may be true but what I feel is that nobody can be happy in isolation. One needs people around to be happy and in that situation also the real happiness will be reached if all think positive. When we talked of these things in that meeting, my elder son casually mentioned one thing which made me to think and I found that to be generally true in all situations and all the times. He said that we learn negatives easily than the positive things. Anything which does not do good to us or is not good for the society is learnt very easily by all. On the other hand, good or positive things require a lot of inner strength and time to be done or learnt. This I found to be an absolute truth. Any good habit to be developed requires sincere efforts on the part of the individual and the group of  people whereas the wrong or negative is learnt without much of efforts. Take the case of performing a task by self takes time to learn whereas getting it done or delegating it to somebody is very easy. Blaming others for anything wrong happening is easy but owning the responsibility for that takes time to learn. It similar to the fact that there is no gathering of rose without being plucked by thorns.Take the case of the children, parents find it difficult to make their children drink milk but they learn drinking the soft drinks without any efforts. The children learn to eat junk food very easily but to make them eat healthy food is a difficult task for the parents and the teachers.  To learn to smoke seems to be very easy but getting rid of that requires long therapy sessions. What does it teach us? The teaching is that we learn negative things easily but this is not so in case when we want to learn good or positive things. Does it mean that good things are difficult? In a way yes, but this may not be true always and not for everything. We may take a very simple example of Hindi films in which the hero of the film fight against the bad people for about two hours and suffer a lot during this period but ultimately wins. One of the students had asked me once, what is the use of suffering for three fourth of your life and then being happy for one fourth .It was a very genuine questioned was asked by this child because he had been exposed to things so often and he was not taught to live a selfless life. This one person brings happiness on the faces of so many people and that happiness cannot be measured in terms of the length of the time. Then how do we know what is good and what is bad ? For this we should apply simple logic, that if something is learnt very easily without any efforts cannot be good and anything which requires sincere efforts will always be good. So it is very easy for everyone of us to know and analyze what is good and what is not. You do not necessarily need anyone to guide you or tell you about good or bad if you apply the simple logic mentioned above. There may be some exceptions but this will be true in most of the cases .Remember you will learn more about a road by travelling on it than consulting all the maps in the world  and also ensure that you take the right road in the right direction instead of just the right speed.