Thursday, August 13, 2009


Again this year, we had Light the Lamp Within workshops with Class VIII friends of Sathya Sai Vidhya Vihar, Indore from 23rd to 29th July.Lots of learning and insights for me .
When asked what are the qualities they liked in their friends, the responses were: helpful, caring, sharing, kind, loving, makes me happy, optimistic, truthful, friendly, creative, humorous, active, sporting, cool minded ,supportive, encouraging, sensitive, smiling,patient, trust worthy, listens, understands etc. Similarly their response of traits not being liked by them in some of their classmates were: anger, rude, irritating, boosting, boring, egoistic, disturbing, serious, dominating, liar, negative minded etc. This gave very useful insight to all of us as to what qualities we should have and what traits we must improve upon ,if we want lots of friends in life.
Similarly, their response to a question as to what we can learn from school,which can be of value for our entire life were: good values, manners, discipline, sportsmanship, public speaking, respecting all religions, confidence building by participation, personality development, relationship building, meditation, optimism, co-operation, compassion, team work etc. Lot of learning for all of us.
Loving and inspiring feedback was received advising and motivating me to continue these workshops. Everyone committed to work for self development, living life and being happy and making everyone happy. Interestingly ,when asked to commit to leave a habit "anger" was most common. Also LOVE again scored highest as expectation from parents. Even if they are receiving it, may be they want more expression of same and small actions to reinforce this feeling.
Surprisingly, when few of the friends were not able to fully co-operate few times and I kept on requesting them to do so, the feedback of many of their classmates was with advice to me to be more strict and discipline such friends. An interesting comment was "Today's generation needs punishment and uncle should at least scold the children". Another one was " You can be a little strict so that other children do not repeat the same mistake, which was done by us."Am amused by such simple but powerful messages, though am grateful for the advice but apologise to my sweet friends that it is difficult to follow this advice.
However, my faith in these young friends , got immensely boosted by love, affection ,positive response and overwhelming support to the workshop. Thanks to all of them.