Physical labor has become a shameful act.

A Western thinker, Albert Camus, has written jokingly, in one of his letters, that a time will come when people will start asking their servants to make love for them. If someone falls in love with somebody, he will appoint a servant to go and make love on his behalf!

This can happen some day. We have already started getting everything done by others; love is the only thing which we still do ourselves. We appoint others to pray for us. We employ a priest and tell him to pray on our behalf, to do the rituals on our behalf. We appoint a priest in the temple and tell him to worship on our behalf. Even the things like prayer and worship we are getting done by our servants. So if we are getting our servants to worship for us, it is not unthinkable that some day wise people will tell their servants to make love to their beloved on their behalf. What is the difficulty? And those who will not be able to afford servants to do their job, will feel ashamed that they are so poor that they have to make love themselves.

It is possible someday because there is so much in life which is significant but which we are now getting done by our servants! And we are not at all aware of what we have lost by losing the significant things.

All the strength, all the vitality of life is lost because man’s body and man’s being have been created for a certain amount of labor, and now he has been spared from all that work.

Right labor is also an essential part in the awakening of man’s consciousness and energy.

One morning Abraham Lincoln was polishing his shoes in his house. One of his friends who was visiting him, said, “Lincoln! What are you doing? You polish your own shoes?”

Lincoln said, “You surprise me! Do you polish other people’s shoes? I am polishing my own shoes; do you polish others’ shoes?”

The friend said, “No, no, I get my shoes polished by others!”

Lincoln said, “It is worse to get your shoes polished by others than to polish others’ shoes.”

What does it mean? It means that we are losing our direct contact with life. Our direct contacts with life are those that come through labor.

In the time of Confucius, about three thousand years ago, Confucius once went to visit a village. In a garden he saw an old gardener and his son pulling water out of a well. For the old man the work of drawing water out of a well was very difficult even with the help of his son. And the old man was very old.

Confucius wondered if this old man did not know that bulls and horses were now being used to draw water out of the well. He was drawing it himself. He was using such old methods!

So Confucius went to the old man and said, “My friend! Don’t you know that there has been a new invention? People are drawing water out of wells with the help of horses and bulls. Why are you doing it yourself?”

The old man said, “Speak softly, speak softly! For me, it does not matter what you say but I am afraid my young son may hear you.”

Confucius asked, “What do you mean?”

The old man replied, “I know about these inventions, but all inventions like this take man away from labor. I do not want my son to become disconnected, because the day he becomes disconnected from labor, he will be disconnected from life itself.”

Life and labor are synonymous. Life and labor have the same meaning. But slowly, slowly we have started calling those people who do not have to do physical exertion, fortunate, and those who have to do physical exertion, unfortunate. And in a way it has become so, because in a way many people have dropped doing labor so some people have to do too much labor. Too much labor kills one. Too little labor also kills one.

Hence I said “Right labor. Proper distribution of physical labor.” Each person should do some physical labor. The more intensely, the more blissfully, the more gratefully a man enters the labor part of his life, the more he will find that his life-energy has started moving down from the brain closer to the navel. For labor neither the brain nor the heart is needed. The energy for labor is derived directly from the navel. This is its source.

Along with the right diet a little physical labor is very essential. And it is not that it should be in the interest of others — that if you serve the poor, it benefits the poor; if you go to a village and do farming, it benefits the farmers; if you are doing some labor, you are doing a great social service. These are all false things. It is for your own sake, not for anyone else’s sake. It is not concerned with benefiting anybody else. Someone else may benefit by it, but primarily it is for your own good.

When Churchill retired, one of my friends went to see him at his house. In his old age, Churchill was digging and planting some plants in his garden. My friend asked him some questions about politics. Churchill said, “Drop it! Now it is over. Now if you want to ask me something, you can ask me about two things. You can ask me about the Bible, because I read it at home, and you can ask me about gardening because I do it here in the garden. Now I have no concern about politics. That race is over. Now I am doing labor and prayer.”

When my friend returned he said to me, “I do not understand what kind of man Churchill is. I thought he would give me some answers. But he said he was doing labor and prayer.”

I told him, “Saying labor and prayer is a repetition. Labor and prayer mean the same, they are synonymous. And the day that labor becomes prayer and prayer becomes labor is the day that right labor is attained.”

A little labor is very essential but we have not paid any attention to it. Not even the traditional sannyasins of India paid any attention to labor; they refrained from doing it. There was no question of their doing it. They simply moved in another direction. Rich people stopped laboring because they had money and they could pay for it and sannyasins stopped because they had nothing to do with the world. They neither had to create anything, nor did they have to earn money, so what did they need labor for? The result was that two respected classes of society moved away from labor.

So those in whose hands labor remained, slowly, slowly became disrespected.

For a seeker labor has great significance and usefulness...not because you will produce something from it but because the more you are involved in some kind of labor, the more your consciousness will start becoming centered. It will start coming downwards from the brain. It is not necessary that the labor has to be productive. It can be non-productive also, it can be a simple exercise. But some labor is very essential for the agility of the body, complete alertness of the mind, and total awakening of the being. This is the second part.

There can be a mistake in this part also. Just as one can make a mistake with one’s diet : either one eats too little or one eats too much, so a mistake can happen here also. Either one does not do labour at all or one does too much. Wrestlers do too much labor. They are in a sick state. A wrestler is not a healthy person. A wrestler is putting too much of a burden on the body ; he is raping the body. If the body is raped, then some parts of the body, some muscles, can be developed more. But no wrestler lives long! No wrestler dies in a healthy state.

Do you know this? All wrestlers — whether he is a Gama, or a Sandow, or anybody else with a great body, even the greatest in the world — die unhealthy. They die earlier and they die of violent diseases. Raping the body can swell the muscles and make the body worth looking at, worth exhibiting, but there is a great difference between exhibition and life. There is a great difference between living, being healthy and being an exhibitionist.

Each person should find out according to himself, according to his body, how much labor he should do to live more healthily and more freshly. The more fresh air there is inside the body, the more blissful each and every breath is, the more vitality a person has to explore the inner.

Simonbel, a French philosopher, has written a very wonderful thing in her autobiography. She said, “I was always sick until the age of thirty. I was unhealthy and I had many headaches. But it was only at the age of forty that I realized that until the age of thirty I was an atheist. I became healthy when I became a theist. Only later did I see that my being sick and unhealthy was related to my atheism.”

A person who is sick and unhealthy cannot be full of gratitude towards existence. There can be no thankfulness in him towards existence. There is only anger. It is impossible for such a person to accept something towards which he is full of anger. He simply rejects it. If one’s life does not attain a certain balance of health through right labor and right exercise, then it is natural that one will have some negativity, a resistance, an anger towards life.

Right labor is an essential rung on the ladder to ultimate theism.

A mindset change to stop honor killings

Over the last couple of months, news has been in pouring in about honor killings in the northern States of Punjab and Haryana. Numerous couples have been killed mostly by family members on the orders of the khap panchyats because they eloped, married outside their caste or within the same ‘gotra’. The problem is not limited to the north, but can be seen in numerous southern states as well. Initially my reaction was one of plain shock, but as news and reactions come in I am beyond disgusted and ashamed. I find it hard to believe that such a gruesome system of honor killings flourishes in India!

The central government is planning to include such killings and killers in a special provision of the Indian Penal Code so that they can be tried for murder. (Does it mean they are currently not murderers?) But instead of acting upon it with urgency, the government has convened a group of ministers to deliberate upon the matter, as honor killings is a sensitive issue. While it is sensitive, the sensitivity is limited to the victims and not the murders, the khap panchayats. The real problem here is that some members of the government are concerned about their vote banks in these northern states, as the khap panchyats wield almost total control over a large section of the rural community. Labeling them as murders would damage relationships and minimize chances of re-election.

The khap panchyats are but kangaroo courts operating mostly outside the realm of Indian law. They have their own rules and laws, and they make sure that their decisions are implemented to the T. These courts display, at best, a medieval mindset as they go about ordering killings of couples for marrying within the gotra, outside the caste or even eloping. They believe that marrying within the same gotra is tantamount to incest. According to Hindu traditions, all Hindus can trace their origins to seven or eight sages, after whom the gotras get their names, and are passed on through the family. So if you have the same gotra or lineage (a very rough translation) then those two people should be considered siblings and cannot marry. While this idea is not strictly enforced in most of the families today, arranged marriages would include ensuring that the bride and groom have different gotras. The honor killings are an incomprehensible extension of the whole idea.

As the Manmohan Singh government ponders over the killings and framing special laws for them, what I do not understand is why these khap panchayat members cannot be arrested and tried as accessories. It is after all under their direction that the killings were executed. I fail to understand why the government even needs time to think about it. It is a no –brainer. The people have killed and boosted about it many-a-times, and should therefore be arrested and tried.

As India tries to fly high with its nuclear deals, claims to an UNSC permanent seat, ~8% growth rate, a sense of moral uprightness in dealing with Pakistan, condemning human rights abuses across the globe etc. such disgraceful events will only deal a blow to its international image. Honor killings are murders, human right abuses, atrocities against women, denial of individual’s freedom of choice, and a display of the failure of the law and order situation in the country. India cannot claim to be a democracy, one of the biggest at that, if it cannot guarantee its citizen their fundamental rights to live on their own terms. It is a failure of the Manmohan Singh government and the Prime Minister personally, if he cannot put an end to such inhuman systems, and if his ministers/party/coalition members vote bank calculations are a reason for it.

The world, along with India, has condemned honor killings in the Islamic countries. It would be hypocritical to expect that the world would sit by and ignore for too long the frequency of such monstrous acts in India. It would be a travesty if India cannot clean up its act and take action to end the system no matter how politically sensitive it is. A new law or provision in the Indian Penal Code would not be sufficient, the government and other social organizations would have to take up a mass movement to change the mindsets of the people. A separate movement would be necessary to change the attitudes and mindsets of politicians who find it alright to hesitate in acting against such atrocities, and even defend the khap panchyats. Honor killing is more than a law and order problem; it is a social evil. And proper education, awareness and sincerity in the implementation of laws protecting human rights and women’s rights would be the right way to go about it. The problem exists and India should accept it and tackle it with all its might. The people need to stand up against such systems and force the government to ensure them their right to love and live.

What's A Citizen's Life Worth?

Imagine you kiss your child goodnight. You go back to your room to sleep. During the night, poisonous gases fill your child's room, suffocating him. In the morning, when you go to wake him up for school, you find him dead. I am sorry to create this gory visual, and i hope and pray this never happens to you. However, this is precisely what happened to thousands of families in Bhopal in 1984.

Many factors led to, and could have prevented, the incident. The location of a poisonous chemicals facility so close to the city, poor maintenance of equipment, cutting corners on safety by management, previous warnings about plant safety, labour issues - all these have been identified by studies post the incident. There are clearly two guilty parties - the company Union Carbide that owned the plant, and various government authorities that gave various approvals for it.

More disturbing is the post-incident handling of affairs by our government. It is reported that the government actually assisted Warren Anderson, CEO of Union Carbide India Limited, in leaving the country. The other accused were punished after 25 years, after getting two-year sentences, and were out on bail after paying Rs 25,000 bonds.

Compare this to the oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico, 65 km away from the US shoreline. The spill started in April due to an explosion on board Deepwater Horizon, an offshore drilling rig leased by BP, one of the world's leading oil exploration companies. So far the only human casualties are around 11 people who died during the explosion. The spill, while causing significant damage to marine life and ecology, is not expected to cause any further human casualties.

The US government, however, is sparing no effort in bringing BP to book. President Barack Obama himself has made several anger-filled statements about BP's 'recklessness' and doing 'what it takes' to get BP to fix it. Such is the fear of the US government's resolve to teach BP a lesson that BP shares have lost half their market value since the spill began - or a value decline close to $90 billion. Analysts estimate that BP may have to compensate up to $1,000 for every barrel of oil spilled (incidentally, the Bhopal accused came out on bail for around half that amount). BP had to cut its dividends, risks a takeover and has already spent billions trying to plug the leak.

That's how you teach big corporates a lesson. You make the cost of playing with safety so high that they never even dream of short cuts. While it is unfortunate that one incident can wipe out a global corporate, there is no other choice. One big guy punished changes the way thousands of other companies think. I can bet every oil company right now is evaluating its safety procedures. To protect marine life and related industries, even the business-friendly US government is ready to - as a White House spokesman said - "put the boot on BP's neck".

Back home, it is a different story. In a village in Punjab, kids are having neurological problems as there is uranium in the water due to pollution by a nearby plant. And Bhopal, the mother of all industrial disasters, is serving as an example of how cheaply our government values Indian citizen's lives.

Let there be no doubt, the government is as much a culprit in Bhopal as Union Carbide. Every plant approval, safety norms and inspections also involve government authorities. Palms are greased, relationships are made and the good Indian businessmen learn to manage government officials. After all, the skill of doing business in India is managing the system, not innovation or better products. The nexus between rich people and government servants is strong, and you will often find one in the other's living rooms in the evenings.

Why do so many politicians socialise with industrialists? Over dinners, they bond and plan their kids' education and their wives' shopping trips. Over parties, they shake hands over approvals. It all seems perfectly harmless. After all, what's wrong in making friends? However, trouble happens when disaster strikes. The first person the politician/bureaucrat helps is the industrialist, not the suffering people. I'm sure Anderson knew the right people. And he used his contacts to make his escape. The little kid who got gassed didn't have contacts. Neither did he have a government representative who would bang his fists on the table to get him justice. Because, quite simply, people here are cheaper than fish.

All hope is not lost, however. We can still learn our lessons and do a couple of things. One, our laws need to be amended for corporate disasters. They make a mistake, they have to pay - heavily. Two, politician-industrialist socialising should not be encouraged. A politician making social visits with industrialists, while it can't be banned, should definitely be disclosed. Finally, our golden opportunity comes when Obama visits in November. If he can scream so much for fish, surely we can tell him what an American company did to our kids. He loves to appease, and maybe we can get a large amount for the victims. But for that, some leader will have to bang his fists on the table for the people of Bhopal. Do it, for we don't want anyone to suffocate our kids again -ever.