Our religious writings preaches us to love and respect our parents, elders, relatives and fellow human beings. In today’s “modern” world living in Britain, we often think that our parents and elders do not understand and sympathise with the problems we face at school, work and in our social life, but we must remember and appreciate that they were young too once and have passed through a similar phase but only at a different time and place.
Only too often we forget the sacrifices our parents made when they came to this country. The hardship, difficulties, and significant adjustment they had to make in their lifestyle. They did this for the future of their children, so that they received a decent education and could live a successful prosperous and honest life.
Our parents and elders have maintained and kept alive our rich culture, religion, language and traditions through dedication and perseverance. We have come to know the people in our community all over the UK through social functions and visiting on a regular basis.
Our parents and members of our community tried to improve living not only in this country but in villages in India through fund raising and donations.
We very often take for granted our parents love, tolerance, and acceptance of our demands on their time and energy often selfishly, without any regard for their feelings and principle. Many relationships change and even break up, but the special bond of love we have with our parents never breaks, in fact it grows stronger and closer as we get older. All through our lives our parents forgive us for the many mistakes we make and even encourage us to learn from the mistakes motivating us when we feel like giving up.
It is only when we ourselves become parents we appreciate and release what parents have done for us. We struggle to bring up our children with the wonderful memories of our childhood and make every effort to try and cultivate in them the love, respect, and understanding of our heritage, motherland, culture and language while at the same time encouraging them to succeed in studies, at work and in social life of this country.
We must not forget our duty to our parents, but at the same time parents must also be aware and understand of the problems and pressures their children face living in Britain. The parents too must change and be flexible in their attitude, views, and approach. There must be more tolerance and an open mind in their way of thinking, to be able to live in harmony in a multi-cultural society. So let us not forget the teachings or our religious scriptures. Where there is a problem or difference of opinion we must always solve through understanding, tolerance, communication and negotiation.
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