Let’s pledge to be kind
13th of November is annually observed as World Kindness day around the globe. It was introduced in 1998 by the World Kindness Movement, a coalition of kindness NGOs from various nations. The idea for this day originated from a conference held in Tokyo in 1997, where like-minded organizations came together to promote kindness all over the world.
The day aims to highlight good deeds in the community, focusing on the positive power and common thread of kindness that binds us all. In fact, kindness is one of the essential traits of human beings which makes us unique among all the other living creatures on earth. All the other species may or may not have this trait in the substantial capacity and conscious way as humans do possess and master it.
Being humans, we often display kindness at our individual as well as collective levels. Starting from our families, relatives, peer groups, neighbours to our institutional colleagues, business enterprises and at the national and international forums we often display some element of kindness or at least pretend to be kind.
When parents show a glimpse of kindness towards their children, they learn and display it among the siblings and their friends. As a result, both the families as well as the friend circles breed love and affection among themselves which cements their mutual bond of respect and cooperation in the long run.
Likewise, kindness among colleagues from various socio-economic and psychological backgrounds at different work places, offices, institutions and platforms as well as down the hierarchical ranks creates a healthy and productive working environment which makes even the tedious work enjoyable. Not only this, the subordinates like to take the assigned duties so personal and treat the fellow colleagues as the members of a large extended family. This produces an atmosphere of “we feeling” and integrates the whole institution or the system into one unit which later on proves beneficial at the times of any adversity or emergency.
When we talk of kindness at national and international levels, we make ground fertile for the new friendships, new assignments, greater opportunities, deeper engagements and new vistas of prosperity and development for our own people. This also gives us recognition and enables us to play a larger role as a national and international stakeholder.
Imagine a doctor being unkind towards patients, a bureaucrat being unkind towards his subordinates, a head of any family unkind towards his dependents, or even any official unkind towards his subordinate staff. All this will produce negative repercussions. Not being kind has its own devastating consequences. In its absence, we can’t see stable families and institutions. Conflicts become rule of the day.
In order to develop an ecosystem of love, tolerance, brotherhood, mutual respect and cooperation, we must make kindness as an essential part of our daily routine and follow the dictum of “live and let live” in every walk of our life. Then and only then we can make our planet beautiful and worth living.
We must not forget that every act of kindness counts. Let’s pledge to be kind. The more we adopt it, the more we will be contributing to humanity.
Dr Rafi Ramzan Dar teacher Geography at Govt. Degree college, Anantnag.
