The World Values Day is celebrated as a day to enable us to strengthen our values so that we can help the world move ahead in peace and solidarity.
Values are motivating factors in our life.
It is said values are founded on passion and reason. Passion in our hearts and reason that prompts as to do things!
People with basic human values build bridges of fellowship, not walls of hate. They become useful agents of change and progress in society.
Such basic values are truth and honesty, loyalty and love, peace and fellowship. Bereft of these, we turn cannibals, war mongers, megalomaniacs, hate mongers, liars and opportunists. Values regulate our life and motivate us to be useful to society. Civilized behavior is built on values.
We begin to absorb values from the moment of our birth. It happens like osmosis. Good parentage will mean children growing with values that will be great assets for them at every moment of their life. They turn into men and women of character.
Like parents, educators also have a great role in building character in their students. Many successful people have narrated wholesome experiences in their life where they absorbed values from parents, teachers, pastors, or elders. In his inspiring biography, Wings of Fire, Abdul Kalam, who became India’s 11th President from 2002 to 2007, speaks of the noble values he absorbed from his father and mother.
He recalls the inspiring words of his father once to him: “Why be afraid of difficulties, sufferings and problems? When struggles come, try to understand the relevance of your sufferings. Adversity always offers opportunities for introspection.” No wonder, with a good parentage, Kalam rose from a newspaper boy to the place of highest honour in the country.
“I have throughout my life tried to emulate my father,. . . and endeavored to understand the fundamental truths revealed to me by my father…I inherited honesty and self discipline from my father; from my mother I inherited faith in goodness and deep kindness and so did my three brothers and sister,” notes Kalam in his autobiography.
When leaders become characterless through corruption and opportunistic behavior they devalue their own lives. They become society’s termites. They exert bad influence on people and engage them to turn anti-social and social perverts. Such characterless guides and leaders have zero values.
Let parents pass on human values to their offsprings. No use shedding crocodile tears after having let loose their children to become victims of drugs or anti-socials. There are numerous examples where children exerted pressure on their parents to have their way and the parents repented when it was already too late.
There are communities in which parents are afraid even to scold their children for wayward behavior. The end result can be expected. Monsters in society!