What we distribute matters: Mohan Bhagwat urges people to look beyond personal wealth at US event

New York, Aug 30 (IANS) RSS chief Mohan Bhagwat has urged people to look beyond personal wealth and material success, saying the real measure of life lies in how much they return to society.

Addressing the Universal Oneness Celebration at Garden in New York, Bhagwat said every person depended on the work and contribution of others. That created a corresponding responsibility to give back.

“How much we earn is not important. How much we distribute is important,” he said.

Bhagwat questioned whether a career should be viewed only as a path to money and material comfort.

“You think of career. Is career only money? Is career only material happiness? It is not denied,” he said.

He said Indian traditions did not reject wealth or material achievement. They treated both as legitimate parts of human life, but not as its sole purpose.

“Even our Upanishads tell us that don’t go only after liberation. You have to achieve material success also,” Bhagwat said.

He argued that people could not claim to be entirely self-made because their lives were supported by parents, farmers, labourers and numerous others whom they might never meet.

“You, we all, we have come to this stage of life. We have grown, we are learning, and we will thrive. Who gave us all this capacity?” he asked.

“Who gave us this body, our parents,” he said. “Food you eat. There is some agriculture in the world. That is why you can eat. If farmers stop farming, what will you eat?”

Bhagwat also referred to the labour involved in producing everyday necessities such as clothing.

“You are wearing your clothes because there are mills. Labourers are working. Cotton growing farmers are still there,” he said.

“We owe everything to someone else. We take from the world. And so we have to give back.”

Pursuit of material happiness could not provide lasting satisfaction, he said. He illustrated the point by referring to doughnuts, drawing on an everyday example to explain the temporary nature of physical pleasure.

“If I like, what should I say, doughnuts in New York. So I will eat doughnuts. How many doughnuts I can eat at a time? I don’t know. I am a diabetic,” he said.

“Tomorrow morning I am ready to eat 50 more. So the material happiness is transitory, cannot satisfy, and if abundance of material happiness is there, it may fail also.”

Human beings, he said, had a special capacity to think about the consequences of their choices. The direction of that thought determined whether they served only themselves or accepted responsibility for others.

“You can think, but in what way you think, that is important. If you think in right way, you go nearer to God. If you think in wrong way, you go nearer to the animal kingdom,” Bhagwat said.

He called for a life in which personal needs were met without ignoring the welfare of society and nature.

“We have to care for each other. We have to care so that my life is sustaining life,” he said. “I sustain others. I live and not merely let live. Make others live. That is the message.”

–IANS

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