LISTEN TO THE VOICE FROM WITHIN, IT IS THE VOICE OF GOD

A few days ago I was waiting at a bus stop when a street urchin approached me and begged for alms. I brushed him aside rudely. But when I returned home, I felt bad for shooing away a poor child. This is the prick of conscience that keeps gnawing at a person when he/she does something against the grain and intrinsic nature of his or her character.

History is proof of this too. Emperor Ashoka became Ashoka The Great following the decisive battle of Kalinga that caused so much bloodshed that he cried and turned a pacifist. Pricks of conscience or pangs of morality make us all human beings. The voice from within is the voice of god, so listen to it. It’s the celestial message, decoded by a sensitively evolved mind. When a disciple of Jiddu Krishnamurthy asked him how to differentiate between a moral and immoral act, Jiddu said, ‘What pains you after an action and makes you restless and sleepless is immoral.’ So very true.

We are all conscientious creatures and our conscience is not dead, though it could be temporarily dormant. This is the sign that the world still exists and there’s still a modicum of human decency left and felt despite the widespread erosion of human values. To quote Urdu poet and critic Mazhar Imam, ‘Rooh abhi tak zinda hai/Isliye toh insaaniyat rakhshanda hai ‘ (The conscience is still alive and that’s why the humanity is still bright with hope).