Relationships, company and keeping your word

Today’s biggest problem, he says, is that people do not talk: father and son, mother and daughter, husband and wife, neighbours and colleagues. In many homes each person sits in a separate room with a phone, even at the dining table. In great households, Tagore’s or Indira Gandhi’s, the family talked over meals.

The Mahabharata is full of dialogue, he points out: Draupadi rebuking her five husbands while they listen; Krishna going one last time to ask Duryodhana for even five villages; Maitreyi questioning Yajnavalkya, a woman asking and being answered. Talk at least once a day as a family, he urges young people. Silence breeds frustration; conversation keeps a family together.

A relationship is like a seed, he says. It grows into a plant and then a tree only if you water and feed it. We make a connection and then forget it. Worse, a ‘use and throw’ attitude has crept in: relationships kept only while they are useful.

If a friendship of ten or twenty years breaks over one small incident, he asks, was it ever deep? Relationships should not be written in sand, where the next wave wipes them out, but carved like an inscription on stone. Keep your ties with parents, brothers and sisters, teachers and friends, and when something goes wrong, be ready to forgive. Forgiveness makes a relationship firm.

A kept promise, he says, raises your worth in society and builds trust, in others and in yourself. It is an art because it needs patience, dedication and commitment. Rama kept his word and went to the forest for fourteen years; even after Dasharatha died and Bharata begged him, he did not come back.

In earlier times a son would repay a debt his father left behind. Small things, such as returning a borrowed book on time, carry large meaning. Keep the promises you make to yourself as well: to study, to rise early, to repay money on time. Keeping them may cost you something, he admits. Keep them anyway, honestly and on time.

Good company, he says, is like water added to milk: it becomes milk. Bad company is like lemon: the milk splits. Tulsidas wrote that a bad person improves in good company, and a good person is spoiled by bad. Many young people start smoking, drinking or taking drugs only because one friend did.

From his long experience he believes that even an average student who keeps company with bright, hard-working classmates slowly rises, from second class to first class and then to the top. Choose friends who are positive, who give good advice in hard times and build your confidence. Stay away from those who only say nothing will work.

When we meet someone new, he says, we judge them by their clothes and brands. But character and conduct are what make a person. Abraham Lincoln and Gandhi lived simply and were rich in qualities.

Comparing ourselves with others, and racing to buy more things, traps us in a whirlpool that feeds ego, and ego brings a person down. Stay simple, keep compassion and kindness in your heart, and never look down on anyone; others are human too. Try helping someone, he says. Life will feel joyful, and people will remember you for who you were.