Nosedive in humanitarian values is alarming

 
While we were children a few decades back, it was a huge pleasure for us when guests visited our homes to stay for a couple of days. Big families were seen living in almost all homes sharing delight and distress with one another in close bonds but during last several years the idea of living in combined families has become a very unpopular one. Each large family has broken away into four or five smaller families augmenting the magnitude of self-absorption among everyone. As consequences of lack of confidence among family members in the present era, lots of married couples are breaking off with each other and thus the number of single parents is rising even in a conservative country like Bangladesh.

Urbanization never stood for absence of reciprocal warmth, unfriendliness or moving into cloistered shells but we have turned urban lifestyle into an incorrect synonym for aloofness and segregation. Being self-cornered is not the right way of living. Things around us are fast becoming restless, inconsistent and dreary because we have moved far away from social activities and thus society has been deprived of our valuable attention.

Mother Teresa once said, “Loneliness and the feeling of being unwanted is the most terrible poverty.” Lots of countries have been able to eliminate monetary poverty. Millions of people around us have become rich overnight. Costly dresses are dazzling in apparel stores packed with customers. Expensive cars are running along the roads. High-rise buildings are preventing sunlight from entering our balconies but the poverty in our minds, the appetite in our souls and the thirst in our hearts cannot be mitigated with these pricey things. We need to restore true love, friendship, hospitality, compassion and togetherness for this purpose.

We will have to make time from our work-packed schedule to invite friends for a cup of coffee with some snacks. We are under moral obligations to visit our relatives and family members by arriving at their households to see how they are living. To become more humanistic and less mechanical, we need to retrieve the interpersonal affinity that we have lost.

Another point needs to be remembered for the sake of retaining good ties with people which is the fact that our expectations from others should be limited. At the same time we should abstain from making promises which we cannot keep. William Shakespeare once wrote, “Expectation is the root of all heartache.”

Everything should not be judged from materialistic viewpoints. Notions of gains and losses should not be attached to our relationship with families and friends. Looking at things from a businesslike angle is another absurdity of the prevailing times.