New Year & wishes

Celebrations are part of our life. We celebrate so many events all round the year; be it birthdays, anniversaries, season's festivals. So is New Year, an annual event every year, we welcome with fireworks display, honking and joyful singing and dancing. We welcome the New Year with hope and aspirations, expectations and anticipation. But most of all, our wish for every New Year is peace, an yearning for life to be free from the shackles of distress, poverty, misery and deprivation. Somehow that 'peace' for mankind isn't coming true, it appears to be evading our embrace. Yet, the revelry for New Year to welcome continues year after year at the beginning of the annual event.

What is peace, I asked an elderly villager of mine as we sat across the local village bund facing the sun parched fields. He looked up. The sun was setting beyond the hill against the clear wintry sky; a flock of birds were flying towards the South in a semi-circle pattern. Peace is in the mind, he said looking deep into my eyes. Why don't you elaborate, I asked. Everything is peaceful if you're peaceful with yourself, he added. Why are we restless today - agitating, protesting and demanding - is because we are not at peace with ourselves and there's so much confusion everywhere, be it within the State, our country and the world over, and yet we ask for peace, he continued to add further. Peace is just an imaginary illusion we dwell upon. It is practical only through our actions, he concluded. Indeed, I feel the same.

In the New Year 2019, let us not ask for peace or wish for peace, rather let us be practical in life that should we understand mankind as humans without differentiating between gender, class and caste then what we owe each other and the world is our actions. What the world needs today is love and compassion, these will lead to a state of living   in self image and of nature understanding one another to maintain harmony of existence which is conducive to peaceful living. May 2019 usher in with a change of mind for mankind  to make the world a better place to live.