Sri Ramakrishna Math : The Vedanta Kesari, November 2002

Environment for Growth: A truly concerning factor that eludes our reckoning is the environment in which the youth are compelled to grow. With the rise in number of poor, less-privileged, homeless and frustrated youth all around, and their taking to drugs, violence, involvement with gangs, etc., there is a serious deterioration in the environment. It is becoming more and more risky, mostly for youths, to move about and live in areas with a high incidence of poverty, juvenile delinquency, drug abuse, crime etc. Living conditions that are dehumanizing affect young people's psyche, leading them to treat these as an integral part of a society.

Community Support in Change: It is not the responsibility of the Government alone to provide positive alternatives for young people who engage themselves in antisocial acts, but of all members of the society. Efforts are to be taken locally to minimize the volume of enterprise needed. Some NGOs are doing it in their own way, with limited resources. It seems, in some cases, money is not the problem. What is lacking is the moral support of the society (I mean all the members of the local community) to the concept that these youths can become and, in fact, are valued as productive members of a community and the country.

Providing Positive Alternatives: Sensible philanthropists are engaged in the act of providing positive alternatives for youth to enhance and channelise their potential. Unless we are able to create opportunities for young people to keep them engaged in the act of manifesting their full potential, they will continue to get involved in unsocial behaviour and may find damaging alternatives. What they need is not charitable support, but opportunities to build skills, exercise leadership, and establish a firm relationship with the caring community. It is not an individual, but a community that can ensure their safety when they detach themselves from gangs and wake up to the call of a rosy dawn. There is always a dream in every youth to grow and acquire rights not only as a voter but as a citizen also. If they are taken care of, they will surely prove to be caring; if they are trusted, they will prove to be trustworthy.

Handling the Period of Rapid Growth: Elders should see in the youth their own newer versions--improved, more efficient and free from earlier defects. A positive dimension into the growth of youths should be initiated at the time when they are in the formative stages of their childhood. When the period of adolescence begins they should be able to pull their reins on fast emotional changes which come due to the rapidity of their growth. This period offers to the awe-struck young mind a vast horizon of colourful emotions, which keeps on changing. There is jubilation in being able to unmake things that their elders have made, for it evinces a confidence in their power. This is the time when they require adult support and interest. Rabindranath Tagore says that during teenage, young people are easily misunderstood by both seniors and juniors: their simplicity is termed as childishness and seriousness is termed as over-maturity. As a result, they lose their sense of belonging, and try to find friendship, safety, and scope for development of leadership skills and responsibilities in gang- or group-membership.

As a positive alternative to this eventuality, it is necessary to understand with care and sympathy the force of turmoil of rapid growth and changes in youth. It is at this juncture that we are required to appreciate and make them aware of their strengths and not failings. It will be wrong to think that they are oblivious of their competence, their usefulness and their power. But what they need is a bit of appreciation. It will be wise to appreciate their potential before they start asserting them.

As a sharp contrast to this, the elders, in some societies, sometimes overdo their sympathy with the emotions of children even. At this stage of their growth, we should convince them about the harmful aspects of those childish emotions. But, instead, we go on pampering them. A small child may complain of boredom. Immediately the parents take it for a disease and take the child to a counselling centre. With such treatment, children cannot but grow into highly emotional individuals who are unable to check damaging emotions like lust and anger leading to delusion, loss of judgment and finally to disintegration of relationship or ties. They go on conquering hearts to break them, and creating homes to pull them down. One wonders why it should be difficult for parents themselves to help children make a habit of using their thinking power in tracking down unreasonable emotions!

Helping to Quench the Thirst for Leadership: The youth is synonymous with the sense of responsibility. It is the idea of leadership that is most dear to their heart. From them alone our future leaders are going to emerge. The concept of leadership training does not envisage that all should be leaders. It is said that leaders are born, not created. In a world of highly professional and technical people it is not always easy to deliver as leaders only through talent or predisposition. One has to develop the qualities, wisdom, courage and efficiency of a leader through grinding disciplines. Leadership is more a kind of 'stepping out of oneself to work for common good' than simply facing the challenges as managers do. The youth is abundantly endowed with the courage that is required for a leader with a vision. The independent spirit in the youth welcomes such an approach to bring out their potential because they love to take decisions, face the consequences, take the blames, and learn from their mistakes--these are all the positive forces which offer saving challenges.

Looking at Youths as Cultural Resources also: In a world with depleting resources we have been unmindfully allowing our own resources to go waste. More often than not, the youth is admired as economic resources but not as cultural resources. In this respect, their value is being underestimated. Youth development is not youth involvement or empowerment, but a gradual transformation towards enlightened citizenship.

Helping Integrated Development: Our plans and visions do not address the subject of developing and harnessing youth potential as an integrated whole, taking them with families and societies as partners in change--at the lower level of our existence we look at the 'individual fear of loss', at the higher level we love to work for 'common good and common goals'. An individualistic approach fails to focus on or emphasize collective gains, which only can offer enough opportunities to everyone.

In affluent societies the youth are getting detached from their communities. Having grown in an atmosphere of individualistic paradigm, they find it difficult to appreciate the crying need for a well-knit community for people to survive the challenges of life.

Many NGOs are conducting youth camps with well-thoughtout programmes to involve them with other young people or places, and to acquaint them with a holistic approach to life through physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual nourishment. The experiences are encouraging not only for the organisers but also for the youth themselves. They are evincing noble traits of head, heart and hands.

In a remote area in the state of Assam, India, with a high incidence of crime and violence, there has been a small centre of an NGO. This centre started a small free coaching centre for school-going students. The authorities appointed a few unemployed youth of the locality to teach young children. In course of time the number on the roll grew. Now in both evening and morning when students come there for studies, with their parents coming to the centre to drop them, the centre takes the look of a community centre. This is like a non-school hour engagement for children. There is involvement of teachers--youth who would otherwise spend their time in objectionable activities, involvement of parents who spend a portion of their TV-time sitting with children in the prayer hall of the centre, and involvement of people of the locality, who come there to watch sports meets and attend festivals. Slowly the incidents of crime and violence in the locality dropped. Having taken up the sacred duty of teaching the children, these young teachers can no longer loiter about in the streets, and the elders have been made duty-bound to spend a portion of their idle time in useful activities.

Engaging the Growing Number of Elders: There is no denying the fact that today the world has the luxury of a new force: the growing number of senior citizens. This is a treasure the society and the elders themselves have forgotten to make use of. Along with the withdrawal of attachment from a worldly life for preparation for a grand finale of it, they can start forums in order to float programmes to cater to the various value-based needs of young people. In the Third-World countries, many retired parents of educated youth who reside in foreign lands, live lonely lives at home. With vast and varied experience at their command they can be worthy counsellors than the theoretical experts. They can even associate themselves with working NGOs to contribute their service in the field of youth development and other needs of societies.

In today's world, due to inter-mingling of races, exchange of skills, IT-explosion, easy alliances between harmful forces, etc., barriers are falling apart. People are becoming more and more free to take up even citizenship under a government of their choice. Is this freedom going to be licentious in the long run?--is the question. We are afraid, the question itself poses the answer 'yes'. In that case, the elders can sit together to chalk out plans to prevent this eventuality from becoming a reality.

It is not true that our awareness about looking at the youth phenomenon as a whole with its prospects and problems is an unprecedented thing. Bidding adieu to the residential students in a convocation address the teacher in the Taittiriya Upanishad exhorts: 'satyam vada, dharmam chara, svâdhyâyât mâ pramadah &', which means: speak the truth; follow the way of righteousness; do not deviate from studies &. And following this, the teacher acknowledged the truth of his own failings in unequivocal terms: 'Those actions of ours that are commendable are to be followed by you, not the others.' What a glorious test of 'truth put into practice'! Our shame or fear to admit our defects and deficiencies is a formidable malady that keeps truth at bay and enhances dichotomy in us.

Sri Aswini Kumar Dutta, a friend of Swamiji, once asked him, 'Well, Naren, is it true that in a public meeting in Madras you called your critics [who raised the question whether Shudras (pariahs) have right to sannyasa,] pariah?' Swamiji admitted that though he did so because he was angry then, it was not right on his part. There was no attempt to justify the disrespect. Wonder-struck, Aswini Kumar said, 'This is why you could conquer the world.' We remember Sri Ramakrishna himself telling that when he was trying to concentrate his mind in meditation he found it had gone to the house of Rasik (a sweeper who used to live in Dakshineswar). These words bring tremendous hope to a person who has been tirelessly fighting with the recalcitrant mind to bring it under control. As one proceeds further with the convocation address of the teacher of the Taittiriya Upanishad, one is astounded to learn the treasure of practical hints and instructions given by the teacher at that distant point of time when our knowledge, we feel, was not so organized in many fields. Unfortunately, in today's world 'truth is the first casualty' when we try to establish relations in almost all our approaches. Sri Ramakrishna foresaw this defect in us. Therefore he says that in this Kali-yuga to stick to truth is the austerity. One requires more courage and sacrifice to follow the path of truth than to follow the path of unrighteousness. Truth is the very basis of morality. It has to be so if we want to make progress in life. Following it comes the practice of social ethics. The Upanishad says: dharmam chara, i.e., tread along the path of righteousness. This instruction is a guide for living a life of mutual co-operation in society. Unless there is dharma to regulate and guide our public life, there will be no society. Poverty brutalizes and prosperity barbarizes us if we have no dharma to guide us.

The next advice is worth a fortune. It is the instruction to continue with the studies of the scriptures (svâdyâyât mâ pramadah) in order to keep the values of dharma and truth burning in one's mind throughout. This is a value we have already lost due to our reading fictions and viewing movies. Young people do not have the maturity to discern that the characters in the fictions and the scenes in these movies are not translatable into real life. Who does not know that an undying and daring hero is just a myth, a fiction, a stunt, and not real? But the virus catches the imaginations of immature minds and takes its toll until the diseased are awfully disillusioned about the dream. Real life becomes too hard for them.

Our trainings and approaches are reactive in many fields that need preventive or proactive efforts. It is now a sort of doing 'post mortem' investigation to each and every one who has been dying in an epidemic. Day by day the number and varieties of challenges being faced by the youth are increasing with youth development programmes themselves appearing in the list. Programmes that address the symptoms and not the causes are an avoidable strain on the exchequer. They are not long-term, comprehensive solutions; they call for a commitment to investing ourselves. In this venture, we cannot afford to lose any of the two resource components--the youth and the elder. In the cities around the world, there is much of formal education than real learning. While the majority of our people live in poverty, it is a great responsibility on us to see how we can cater more to the needs of the majority, which is a bigger retarding force than the privileged minority. Swami Vivekananda asked the pertinent question, 'Who constitutes society? You, I or a few others of the upper classes or the millions?' He therefore says, 'I hold every man a traitor who being educated with their money does not pay the least heed to them.'

The idea of a whole or unity is the key to addressing all problems. Every individual has to behave to make a disciplined society and to raise our future generation, nay, our future also. Youth are emotionally attracted to short-term gains, quick bucks and therefore commitments that are personal in nature. This type of restlessness does not have the capacity to involve one in long-term and meaningful works. Progra-mmes are needed to infuse in the youth a sense of belonging than standing out tall, a sense of accountability than punishment; these are less costly and more productive.

Our efforts to convince young people about the necessity of developing their full potential will be received by them without seriousness. This is like one of the lessons in their text books. Our efforts to compel them to fall in line, will generate aversion towards us and to what we want them todo. This is supression. But our efforts toconvince them that 'they are needed and are appreciated' will bring about a response in them to take upon their broad shoulders the responsibilities that are theirs. This is called sublimation, which is welcomed not only by youths but by all.