Over the last two and a half thousand
years or so, nations, all over the world, have been enrolling the youth who
have courage and grit, to build up their military might. Tens of millions of
youth have thus been used as grist to the war-mills. Nations have depended for
too long for their external defense and internal security on these young muscle
men that can use batons, bayonets or bullets to strike down an enemy.
Outside the
government, most other institutions have been making no better use of the
energy and earnestness of the youth. Take, for instance, the political parties.
They have been using their; youth wing to wage electoral wars and, when need
be, to break up the public meetings of opposite parties, and to make a show of
muscular strength on occasions. Of course, there are exceptions to this growing
trend as there are exceptions to every rule.
In the fields of
big business and industry also, workers’ unions make use of the youth to raise
high –pitched slogans, to terrorize loyal workers and to make threats so as to
extort maximum benefits from the mill-owners.
The college
unions, call students in large numbers to force the administration to accept
their; demands and, if the latter are adamant, to ransack the Principal’s or
Vice-Chancellor’s office, to break the window-panes and furniture of their “alma mater”, to burn the buses in
order to express indignation against the government and to make bonfire of the
effigy of a professor or an acharya.
It is, therefore,
high time to think whether these are best usages of the youthful energy and
whether there are no other courage-needing activities to which the vigour and
stamina of our youth can best be addressed. Also let us ask ourselves, whether
there is no way to end the curse of wars which devour so many of our talented
youths? Cannot they be fired with the zeal of building up a society from which
wars, exploitations rifts and rivalries have been ousted?
It should be remembered that a nation, which allows its youth to travel far on the path paved with indiscipline, violence and disrespect to elders and teachers, unwittingly permits itself to be dragged down the bill to a state of chaos in not too distant future.
The youth, it must be known, are like a double-edged
sword; they can be used to destroy an enemy in its hide outs or, alternatively,
they can also spread terror in their own territory by a saber rattling. If they
are instigated to sit in strike and to go wild so as to wreck the national
property, and to point daggers at those whom their nation has appointed as
their teachers, and to indulge in acts of arson and rampage at the slightest
provocation, then, there is being built up such an army as will pull down the
structure of their own nation without any remorse.
Let us,
therefore, be wiser to consider our youths to be our present working strength,
and our prospective nation builders. Let us train them to fight the enemy,
camping in the minds of men and women in the form of prejudice-religious,
communal and racial and also prejudice built on the basis of casts, classes and
cults.
You are whole heartedly welcome to
Prajapita Brahma Kumaris Ishwariya Vishwa Vidyalaya
