What Greed can do ?

Greed caused this recession. 

In earlier days when natural calamities would happen or any global phenomena would take place our grandparents - ancestors used to say that when greed increases, unethical business practices and malpractices prevail such global phenomenon and natural calamities would persist.Then as grandchildren we couldn't understand why they said so and often would ignore what they said as we couldn't connect to the chain of events logically,  but what economist say today is a similar version but said in a way which would appeal to an intellectual mind. We all want to read intellectually stimulating reading materials, case studies, white papers etc but we never want to delve deep into our ancient scriptures and traditions. Today foreign authors write and publish books on Indian culture, traditions and human values. The best books on yoga, ayurveda etc are written by American authors. They seem to be understanding the wealth of the Indian heritage more than we Indians. We are busy aping the western culture and are stuck between religious conditioning and fighting new age spirituality in recent times .  

As a Bal Vikas class student,  in childhood like many I was taught about Kama (desire) , Krodha (anger) , Lobha (greed) , Moha (delusion)  Mada (ego - feverishness), Matsarya (envy - not seeing others happy). This was 20 years ago, but the same laws and rules apply even now. That is why they are timeless wisdom. These are also called as shatripus or the six enemies of the mankind and we are witnessing the repercussions at large because of 25000 rich business men who wanted to get more rich. You can also call it as collective karma (samuha karma) that we are facing now. .This recession proves that spirituality is way ahead of materialism. This is a victory of the ancient shastras, puranas and the rishis who kept reiterating the fact that human values are the most important component of every society.The Human values of love, trust, faith, compassion, integrity etc are more relevant in these times also when companies are coming into light for forging books of accounts and conducting unethical business practices. This recession therefore is a manmade calamity which the entire globe would witness. 

I recently read a report by an economist about how greed can cause so much harm to the entire society at large, its a vicious circle. For the first time some of the best companies in Japan have reported loss after a gap of 20 years, the banks which were considered strong are considering bailout plans. If this money which is being used for bailouts could have been used to make schools, temples of knowledge, better health care for the globe, towards cleaning the environment we would have made the entire planet a better place to live in. 

Simplicity is the essence of Life