lack of right thinking
Wrong thinking prompts a person to react to a provocative situation in the same manner, while right thinking teaches a person to defuse a provocative situation and render any provocation ineffective.
Once, a riot broke out in a certain town between members of two communities. In this riot, members of one community faced large-scale loss. Their economy was laid to ruins. I happened to meet a man from this town who belonged to this community. I asked him why the riot had taken place. He said that a procession of members from the other community had entered the locality inhabited by members of his community and there they began raising slogans against this community. On this, residents of the locality got agitated. Some youths among them, he said, then ‘took one step’ as one of them explained. I asked him what that step was. He explained that they had thrown some hand bombs on the procession. This enraged the people in the procession so much that they began to indulge in violence. I asked the man what the slogan was, reacting to which those youths had taken that step. He explained that the sloganeers had called for the locality to be emptied of its inhabitants.
During our conversation, the man claimed that it was necessary to give a reply to this sort of provocative plot. I replied to him saying that he should rather call it an imaginary plot that could never turn into a reality. I asked the man if, after the sloganeering and the rioting, his locality had been emptied of its inhabitants. Enthusiastically, he replied, ‘Certainly not!’, adding that the people of his community still remained there. On this, I remarked that this meant that the slogan raised by the people in the procession had dissolved in the air, as it were, and was not able to be converted into reality.
Listening to the man, I said that the processionists’ slogan was so weak that even after engaging in bloody rioting, it could not empty the locality of the inhabitants of his community. That being the case, I asked, what was the need for those members of his community to get so agitated over such a weak slogan? The simple reply to the slogan would have been to respond in line with the ancient saying, ‘Dogs keep barking, and an elephant continues to walk on.’
The response of the agitated inhabitants of the locality in the example above is one of a lack of right thinking. Right thinking can fully save a person from bloody rioting. But in the above case, wrong thinking resulted in the people of a locality experiencing the two-sided devastation of humiliation and loss. Wrong thinking instigates a person to react to a provocative situation in the very same manner, while right thinking teaches a person how to defuse a provocative situation and render any provocation ineffective.
