One of the participants of our Ayurveda Yoga Holiday who has been here in the past weeks was a teacher. She loved our school project, sat in school for some time and played a lot with the school children as well as the children of our Ashram. One evening I had a talk with her and another participant about our children and mainly about respect.
She was impressed not only by the fact that we are doing our charity work but also by the nature of the children in our school. As a teacher in a big city in France, she said you could hardly compare children there with the children in our school! Here children were so disciplined, peaceful and most of all one could see that their respect. As a teacher she said she could only wish that the children in her classes had as much respect for her as our children had for their teachers.
I told her that I had also noticed this difference on my journeys in the west. Here in India children learn to respect their teachers. A teacher, someone from whom you learn, who will teach you how to advance in life and whatever is important when you grow up is an ideal and someone in whose eyes you want to be good. You respect him or her because your parents speak of that person with much respect, too. They teach you to respect the teacher.
Our second participant, who heard this conversation, added that this was not only true for teachers. She mentioned when you come here and walk down the way at a time when the children run around there, in the morning when they come or the afternoon when they go home from school, you can realize that they look at you with different eyes. They greet, they show respect. You can feel that they have a respect for people who are older than them that children of their age in her home country, the USA, don’t usually have.
I have had many discussions with my western friends about the question of respect in Indian culture and in western culture. It is true, you can see respect in children in India which you don’t see there. Of course I agree that there are other issues and difficulties in between generations here in India.
Some people argue that this respect means that children cannot be really close to their elder siblings, parents or relatives. They cannot tell them when they have done something wrong because they respect them. I see this differently here in India. People are very close and children trust their parents. I believe that the respect that they have rather keeps them from doing very big mistakes which they could then not confess to their parents. Due to their respect they stop before, thinking about their respect for their parents.
There are of course many aspects to this topic. You have to consider the atmosphere surrounding a child or teenager, the culture, the way how people live together in family and even the climate, because of which people don’t stay in their homes but spend more time outside, together, learning the rules of being with each other.
Whatever it is that creates this effect, I believe that it is right if a teenager shows respect in front of those who are older than him or her and we should try to teach this to our children.
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