Some random old thoughts

I had written this up quite a few days back, but finally got time to post it only today. Just something to ponder about...

Humility: a lost virtue

Humility is a virtue that is no longer considered important; in fact, a humble person will be considered an oddity in today's world. This might sound harsh: but I believe this is the result of so-called Americanization of the world. In the eastern countries, humility was long considered to be important for great people. In India, there is a story about a great king called Bali, who was a very generous person. He ruled over all the three worlds, and believed that he could satisfy any request made by anybody as he owned the whole universe. How he was humbled is narrated in this story: The Vamana avatar

One of the places where the lack of humility is glaring is sports, and American sports in particular. Off the top of my head, I can only think of one famous US sportsperson who can qualify to being considered as humble: Tim Duncan, and this view is based on the articles about him and his interviews that I have seen. Come to India, and you find more of his breed...though even that is diminishing quickly. The younger cricketers no longer seem humble or modest; they quickly consider themselves as one of the top players.

Humility is often mistook as being opposite of agression, which is probably important for winning in sports. Tim Duncan, Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid, all seem humble but are still very agressive when it comes to playing their sport. Television programs such as American Idol and Indian Idol do not seem to help the cause as well. Maybe my mom is right...this is Kalyug, and such things are bound to happen :-) Or maybe such things are needed to make progress...but can we call this true progress?