Guru Nanak Dev ji's Gurupurab has always been a day of great celebrations !! Indeed, celebrations of the birthday of the founder guru of Sikhism, is one of those festive times....Right from childhood, i remember, dad tellin me its a day of great importance as well as joy...so we need to wake up early in the morning, get all ready n dressed up in the nicest of our clothes and den go to the gurudwara to pay our oblations to d almighty...apart frm wishing Guru Nanak dev ji - Happy birthday !!! hehe...
but as i grew up learning more n more about the man who founded our religion, not with an aim to establish one...i started to respect my religion, my culture more...Guru Nanak Dev ji had always preached how to live a better and just life without causing harm to anyone else...it was all about finding that perfect way of living....
At age seven, his father, Mehta Kalu, enrolled him at the village school as per the norm.Notable lore recounts that as a child Nanak astonished his teacher by describing the implicit symbolism of the first letter of the alphabet, which is an almost straight stroke in Persian or Arabic, resembling the mathematical version of one, as denoting the unity or oneness of God.
However, ironically, basic principles that he preached of Honesty, Equality and not following rituals n superstitions blindly are long forgotten today, when we're busy celebrating his (approx.) 539th birthday.....
Being so caught up, in the mechanical way of performing our religious duties and studying our holy books, we've forgotten the basic principles, Guru Nanak Dev ji had enlightened our ancestors about... being honest...being impartial...being equal in our relations with people of other cast/creed n color... being unselfish...n all those... Today we do read or listen to the recitations of the same scriptures Baba Nanak had written during his journeys to lands far n away...but like a parrot, we just repeat the recitations again and again, with only a few living acc. to the teachings....
We still treat our servants like a servant...we still bargain with a poor vegetable seller for 2-3 rupees....we still dump our wasted food/stale fruits n vegetables to our housemaids and consider it as an act of great generosity by ourselves...we still try n make a fool out of the less educated to get our things done, at the cheapest price...We still have riots of religion...
We still spend magnanimous amounts of money on building newer and bigger temples to establish supremacy over the ones belonging to other religions..we still give away our honesty and integrity for some meagre wordly pleasures....
Are we being honest to ourselves in celebrating the birthdays of such saintly figures ?...do we think we deserve the right to do so ? ....Do these mere celebrations or performance of certain rituals, cover up for all the bad deeds committed during rest of the year...!
I, certainly, dont think so...!
Let's start the celebrations by celebrating a new phase in our lives...celebrating a new inner self that follows the path preached by our gurus...!..that follows the -path of being a better human being....the path of being a better person !
Introspect ! Realize ! Evolve !
Happy Gurupurab
"Be honest to your inner self...You'll be honest to the world"
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