Page 204 - SocialHarmony

208 Social Harmony

offer to help him. But if there is a rickshaw puller at our door-
step inquiring about somebody, we simply ignore him. Or we
may tell him to come again later. Both, the well-dressed person
and the rickshaw puller are strangers to us, but we welcome
the well-dressed person and reject the person who is not. The
underlying reason is that our reactions are dictated by the
occupations of the people.

We don’t hesitate to shake hands with a well-dressed
person, even though he may be completely idle. We respect a
well-dressed idle person but we hesitate to shake hands with a
hardworking, honest man. We cannot unite society and solve
the problem of discrimination till we learn to take this seriously.
It is impossible to create a homogeneous society until we
inculcate a feeling of fellowship.

We are living in a society where it is easy to earn bread and
butter, but difficult to gain respect and education. However,
education is the biggest tool for further development. Why do
we take so much pain to educate our sons and ignore our
daughters? Mahatma Gandhi said that if we educate a boy, we
are educating only one person, but if a girl gets educated, the
entire family becomes literate. We appreciate and honour those
who educate girls, those who have put their efforts behind
women’s education. Our primary motive should be to prepare
the new generation so as to bring our society forward.

We need to prepare our youth to take charge of social
upliftment. Society is surely going to benefit from such a
collective effort. We should take stock of the progress achieved
in the field of education, because, after all, the development of
society depends on education.

In the past in our society, caste and community might have
been the central forces. In the past, there used to be the
consideration of economics behind sticking to marriages within
the same caste. Suppose the daughter of a potter marries a potter,
she doesn’t need to learn how to knead the clay. She can become
part of the economical arrangement of her family. Similarly, if
the daughter of a tailor gets married to a tailor, there is no need
to teach her stitching and attaching buttons on clothes. She