just as the farmer sows seeds and then prays for the rains
so that he may harvest a bumper crop;
so does the weapon maker pray for an endless war
so that he can keep selling the weapons of death and destruction;
so does the medicine man pray for the ailing crowd
crying for his elixir;
and the shaman for an endless row of departing souls to pray for.
what do you pray for?

if you are an atheist, you may have a wishlist instead of the prayer, or as a radical thinker an agenda, or as a dreamer a romantic wonderland. but for most of us, especially for the ones raised in the compulsory education system, our wakeful moments are spent in preparing for that ideal future; and the great educator of antiquity, lord krishna spelled it out for the generations to come: “your assigned act alone is your dharma, function, not thinking about the fruit of your efforts’’, and ‘count your blessings’, advised by queen victoria.

in every which place, in every company one is handed a list of dos and don’ts as a precondition to associate.

wishes are made up of the absence of things that one had been used to having, or one sees or thinks others are enjoying having them. in the commercial way of life the existential needs are reformed and even replaced with the commercial goods that can be had by paying a price determined by the commerce sector. its token form is money that has to be earned by working for it. that is the dharma, the employment for someone who has set up factories where, some of the very hurt people are employed to give the forms to the wishes of the other depraved people.

but since the wishes are not made of the biological appendages of the wishers who toil their physical forms to acquire them, it is only after acquisitions of those wished for things that the people begin to have un-forethought problems connected with things acquired to enhance the looks or outlooks, whether of a lifestyle or a medical pill or a limb transplant.

if one has problems with a thing, like a malfunctioning automobile or a mechanical appliance, one is legally entitled to have it repaired, but only if it is not a medical problem of surgical or pharmaceutical nature. there, the medicine men have hijacked the law to protect the health industry with the medical treatments packaged with even life threatening side effects. and patients are expected to suffer the “side effects” considering it to be a part of the process of cure. it is more like an auto mechanic fixing your car’s one problem by unwittingly adding several more in running the car that worked just fine without those added problems until the visit to the auto mechanic.

within a biological species that comprises the human societies, nature does not distinguish between the rich and the poor, or the employer and the employed. thus the exploiter and the exploited are related, not just as a species, but within it, even as distant and not untraceably close family relatives. it is thus that, in the u.s. civil war brothers fought and killed brothers. persons who can grudgingly fight and kill the kinfolks do not think twice when killing other people who are not in their conscience as kinfolks, rather they are pictured to be not even human beings by calling them chimera, monsters and such.

the indian expression: “vasudheiva kutumbkam”, “the world is the family” is not experientially the basis upon which the modern families are formed even though the base of the human relationship is existential, as human beings are group dwelling creatures who cannot survive as individuals.

in law, at least, a very small number of people have enabled themselves to become super rich minority. the rest of the other people, while enjoying some of the same material benefits of the rich nation only verbally criticise, as most of the poor who hate the rich also desire to be rich.

if things are not changing to meet one’s wish list, consider this sense of reasoning: for one’s every wish there is the exact opposite wish of another person, who may be one’s kinfolk, colleague, coworker. physician, spiritual guide or the head of the family or even the state. and all of them wish for you to never have your dreams come true. yet, things can change when one stops pretending that one has nothing to do with other’s shortcomings; it is always the others who are in one’s way, and that these others have to be eliminated. that adds up to misery for both sides.

as before the brains begin to function, all the biological limbs’ motions are trained and regulated by the authority figures in the name of country, culture and custom, which, through the repetition form the habit of biological form. and it is this biological conditioning to the pain and suffering that makes one not to seek relief fearing the change would be more painful than the familiar pain. this tendency makes people not follow the right advice, not do the right thing, whether it is health related or in human interaction. habits are much stronger than the desire to break the habit. and the habitual way of life leads one to go in circles, while the evolutionary motion in nature is always stepping into the unknown.

the change is inevitable, whether it is happening in the biological life process between birth and death, or imposed by the political or commercial sector, and grudgingly people, like the army recruits fall in line, whether the marching in steps has anything to do with how one steps in the actual battleground; likewise, schooling does not teach students how to act on job, except in vocational school. both the bootcamp and formal schools are invented to put the natural perceptive senses to sleep so that recruits and students do as told without resistance.

since people have to keep changing, why not change knowingly in a way that what is good for one is also good for others?