Tuesday, October 8, 2019

Times Then and Now Reminiscences and Reflections-4 (Dr. Y.V. Rao)



Times Then and Now
Reminiscences and Reflections
Part- 4
                                          Dr. Yerneni Venkateswara Rao
M.Sc., Ph. D
Retired Principal
Akkineni NageswaraRao College
GUDIVADA- A.P

B1-46
If gold gets fragrance too, what is to become of flowers? Evidently nature abhors accumulation of its treasures in any one place. It prefers , on the contrary, to distribute them equitably among its different constituents.
Isn’t there a message here for man, that greedy creature forever pursuing the elusive goal of accumulating ever more riches of mundane nature ?

B1-47
Nature constantly whispers its messages into the willing ears of its children with motherly care and concern and patiently waits for others to turn to it. Those that heed it will reap its bounties and those that don’t will face its wrath/ fury and perish for while it can wait , it shall not be fooled nor denied. Even a mother with all her tender feelings for her offspring should know when to strike and be prepared to do her damnedest in the interests of the integrity of her family as a whole like a good surgeon ready with his scalpel to excise the rotten limb in order to save the body from further putrefaction.

B1-48
Genius is to talent what a vision is to a view, a strategy to a tactic and a war is to a battle.

B1-49
One who strikes you as a fine looker may turn out to be a deadly hooker. Beware!!

B1-50
Just as an entry is the census register fails to make one a man, so does an entry in the establishment register of a manufactory fail to make a man a worker. Man or worker to be truly one, has to satisfy other criteria besides being enlisted in wither register. Strangely though, the first such criterion for both happens to be the same: WORK. So work one must to establish one’s state of being man or worker. In other words what is needed most in a workplace is the very thing that is most needed in life too, to assure oneself and others that one is not a walking corpse but a living person/ active worker. Devoted work , after all, is at the root of all prosperity and is the gateway to happiness. So the new slogan should be ‘workers of the world unite to work and produce to prosperity for everybody to partake in/of’. “No man ever died of hard work if his spirit is in it but people do die of ennui and other things. So you and I have got to work” so exhorted Jawaharlal Nehru, our first Prime Minister as long ago as in 1949.
If only our work force had realised the full import of those wise words, what a world of difference would it have made to our country’s industrial and economic advancement and our standing as a  nation in the international community?
Furthermore every man is born to do work-work of one sort or the other. To be called upon to do work is both an opportunity and a privilege: opportunity because work affords the only means of proving that one is actually living instead of merely existing, and privilege because through excellence in performance , one gains entry onto and gets elevated to the plane of vibrant living , a prerogative of the fortunate few, instead of wallowing in the mire of mediocrity or worse vegetative existence as is the lot of many a creature.

B1-52
A man who works with his hands is a labourer,  a man who works with his hands and his brain is a craftsmen, but a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart is an artist. While fully agreeing with Louis Nizer, a great intellectual and lawyer and writer , I would add that a man who works with his hands and his brain and his heart and his soul is a yogi for then his self identification with what he is doing is so total as to dissolve the last trace of distinction between him and his work leading to the exclusion of awareness of his very existence/being.

B1-53
If a grandmother is a mother who has a second chance isn’t a teacher a student who has a second chance?

B1-54
Sycophancy is little men’s way of asserting their own insignificance /smallness.

B1-55
Sycophancy is small folks’ slippery staircase /slope to scale the heights of sham glory.


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