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Tag: austerity

Penance

In one of our recent youth satsangs, we had a very engaging discussion on ‘thawam’ from the Kural, which in Tamil means penance / austerity. Is penance only for the likes of Ravana or others who sat and meditated for years together? Or is there some penance possible in our daily lives as well?

Maybe waiting in a line for 14 hours to get one’s hand on the next latest and greatest iPhone could be considered penance. But that would only be scratching the surface. To some, penance is minimalism, such as getting rid of all gadgets (including aforementioned iPhone) and spending time with nature instead. They may also spend much lesser money than others – never eating out, never traveling – being extremely frugal. But where does one draw the line? Does one also stop wearing clothes, taking bath, not sending the kids to school, not visiting a doctor for a medical emergency? Surely penance is about frugality, not miserliness.

Great men and women have said (and experienced) that nothing worth having comes easy. Which means penance is a part of all success worth having. It also begs the question, why is penance so hard? The answer is that it’s not hard. It’s very easy in fact, if one TRULY wants something. Most struggle with this, because they want something (like success), but do not want to work for it.

It’s one thing to do penance for our own benefit. But the truly great people – like my Guru, they observe penances solely for the benefit of others. He observes fasts or chants 21,000 ashotrams for other people’s health – sometimes people who he has not even met! As Thiruvalluvar says, “How fire refines the gold, the pain of penance refines the person.” What more can one ask for?

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learn – earn – yearn

In school and college, it was all about:

  1. winning alone
  2. defeating others
  3. getting the best job interviews, and
  4. bagging the highest paid offer

In the workplace, realisation dawns, that life is about:

  1. winning together
  2. working with others
  3. the ‘best’ job being but a mirage in the mind, and
  4. money being there, but yet never enough

We spend the first quarter of our lives learning how to earn a living. Then we spend next two quarters earning that living. And the last quarter, yearning for whatever was left out.

But we never really live, because we are always focused on the ‘me and the my’, instead of the ‘we and the why’.

‘We’ for inclusivity. And ‘why’ for clarity – why do we have so many things, yet feel empty?

In this age of excesses, less is more. And it comes from more austerity, more self-sacrifice and more charity.

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