#education

"It has also been said that your Education has been a failure no matter how much it has done for you, if it has failed to open your heart. Dr. Zakir Hussain, when Vice-Chancellor of the Aligarh University, said, that the aim of Education was that students should become responsible citizens and not merely bundles of styles and sophistication like articles in a furniture shop – the product now being churned out lacks even that saving grace..... The old system may have produced 'snobs' what is being spewed out now are 'slobs'. The young student in Indian Schools is being smothered under a dead weight of books and notes dealing with a host of subjects imaginable and unimaginable. Busy cramming from morning till night and repeating parrot-like that he does not understand, he is fast becoming a literate moron. Initiative, leadership and education in the real sense of the term are encouraged only in a few public Schools."

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“Of Anger the Dhamnapada says, "He who holds back rising anger like a rolling chariot, him I call, a real driver, other people are but holding the reins.”

“In former days this maxim was displayed in Business Offices, "Call upon a Businessman, at business hours, on business only. Go about your business and thus enable him to finish his own business. This is purely a business matter." There are two reasons why some people don't mind their own business; one is that they haven't any mind and the other that they haven't any business. However, now the Businessman is plagued at all hours by a spate of visitors with no business in view, who just drop in for free information or hospitality and more often than not for contributions to all sorts of charities, often of doubtful flavour or unauthorised.”

“This naturally leads us to the subject to Continence. Our soi-disant manly man with a false sneer of bravado and utter lack of stability considers that Continence is not possible, and like the ostrich tries to hide from the truth. For not only is Continence possible but it is practiced with brilliant success, voluntarily, by hundreds and hundreds of men and women in all walks of life and by all castes and creeds. But its attainment needs courage and determination of the highest degree and which is naturally out of the reach of our flabby indolent moderns, who succumb to the slightest temptation and want to drag everyone down to their own low moral levels.”

“The safest refuge when dealing with urgent, ticklish problems is sought in shirking responsibility, in gaining time by the formation of Committees, with the requisite Sub-Committees to tackle the problem. It is the well-known practice of Promise, Pause, Prepare, Postpone and end by letting things alone. But this cannot last for ever. Now the secret of these Committees is that they consist of a group of men, who individually can do nothing, but collectively can meet and decide that nothing can be done, whilst they know that the best Sub-Committees consist of three persons, two of whom are always absent!”

“One writer quite cutely remarks that his best work of fiction was his Income Tax Return.”

“This subject of Planning in the economic sphere is discussed in a separate paper. We will here deal only with the spiritual angle.”