Resurrection

This one should have been written around Easter; nevertheless, here goes. Resurrection as we know it is the concept of a living being coming back to life from death and the word hails from the Latin word Resurrectio. Sounds like a character from X-Men like Magneto or Pyro! However, it has a far deeper significance. The age old debate on the form of resurrection still continues whether it is in the field of theology or otherwise. Some believe in physical resurrection, which is the restoration of the human body from the dead and others believe in spiritual resurrection which is the movement of the spirit from one body to another. The resurrection of Christ as focused on in Christianity is wherein Christ sacrifices himself to cleanse the people of the world from their sins and gets resurrected in his own body. Resurrection finds a place in Buddhism, Judaism, Greek Mythology and Hinduism too.

There is also a different school of thought on medical resurrection, wherein a person returns to life after being declared clinically dead, which is termed as Lazarus Syndrome. Then there is the technological resurrection, where a person is preserved for ages in low temperatures using Cryogenics and is revived later. The concept has even found place on prime time TV with a TV series of the same name as also in movies.

However, since you and me are too busy dealing with our current life and may not have thought beyond dinner tonight, let alone what we are going to do in the after-life or what form our soul is going to take after we die; let us throw a different spin to the whole resurrection concept. Have you asked yourself about yourself in the recent past? By yourself, I mean the way you behave with other people, the way you tackle problems, the way you approach success and failure. We are built and moulded in a particular way over the years of our life based on the circumstances we grew up in, our education, family, friends and the situations we have faced while growing up. However, we get so stuck to that mould which we have grown into that we sometimes forget to observe, learn and improve. We always feel that the way we adopt is the best. The more we grow into this rigidity the more difficult it becomes to change. The down side of that is, Change is the only Constant! There will inevitably come a time in life wherein we have no option but to look at things from a perspective which is different from ours. It is at that time that our rigidity will be our downfall.

You may note that children find it far easier to adapt to changing circumstances than adults do. Why? Because they are ready to unlearn what they have learnt and understand things anew. They are ready to discover facets of themselves which they never knew about. In short they are ready to rediscover themselves or in short may I say, resurrect themselves. We may as well take a cue from them. There is no shame in learning from kids. They will teach you a whole new chapter or a couple of chapters in your book, mind you!

Therefore, I conclude by asking you to take time out for yourself and understand yourself better. Learn different ways of doing things. Learn whether there is a different you inside. You may do this by talking to friends and family, spending time with a coach, reading, travelling to far flung worlds. Do anything that enriches your understanding about self and rise like a phoenix out of your old ashes! Resurrect yourself!

Tolerance – the enigma

Tolerance is a trait which has been inculcated into living beings from the time life started to exist. Tolerance to the harsh environments in which they survive, tolerance to various plants and animals which they feed on, tolerance to other living beings who they live with.  That was a time when interdependence was a necessity and way of life. A man who was not part of a community or tribe was deemed dead because of his inability to survive alone in the wild. Hence, his ability to sponge up anything that was thrown at him by the other members of the tribe was acute. As time passed, the level of interdependence tapered. Large communities or tribes became smaller and more nuclear. Further, the advent of technology and the invention of machines, made him independent. As a by-product of this independence, his innate feelings of superiority or inferiority surfaced, hence dissipating the level of tolerance in him.

We can see this all around us. Just a glance through the headlines in the daily newspaper or half an hour on the news channel would give us enough instances of this intolerance. It comes in various shades, whether it is racial intolerance, religious intolerance, intolerance sprouting out of beliefs and principles and even dietary choices, age or time. A white cop shoots an unarmed black man, a terrorist outfit kills a hundred people in a university, a group of religious fanatics get together a few villagers and put up a show of their re-conversion to their ‘original’ religion, the occupants of a car beat a biker to death because his bike grazed their car in one of the busiest streets one will find, a Government in a province bans consumption of beef because their religious beliefs do not allow it, people decide to maroon their aged parents in a festival ground because they were ‘too old’, a member of parliament shoots a duo of siblings who took a few extra minutes to remove their truck from the thoroughfare to let his vehicle pass.

If we compare the first paragraph (early days) above with the second (current days), we will see a thin but prominent difference. In the first instance, we see that there was an effort to understand the circumstance before the tolerator tolerated or the tolerated imposed. Actually, one of the two is enough for the situation to end on a happy note. Even in statistics, tolerance means a measure of multi-collinearity which is a phenomenon in which two or more predictor variables are highly correlated, thus making one of the variables linearly predictable with a high level of accuracy. In simple words, a little bit of knowledge or effort on one side keeps the tolerance high and the friction minimal. These days, we don’t find that effort to understand or yield. Hence, the word tolerance has been currently replaced with the words “put up with”.

When people boast about what all they put up with and thus their high tolerance levels, they don’t understand that putting up with something is actually pushing something away, unwantedly or half-heartedly. It is not in the true sense of the word understanding and co-existing. In short, putting up with equals intolerance.

Hence, do think about this. Tolerance is not measured by the extent to which we can put up with something or somebody but by the extent of ease with which we can co-exist with something or somebody without having to put up with it or them.