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tence from his preaching and to take it as everything is not doing justice to Mahavir. His basic concept of multiple manifoldness of reality (Anekant) realized by real identification of the nature of thing cannot be comprehended by our one-sided vision.
Every era evolves a comfortable and so-called profitable lifestyle. Simple and pure life is neglected. A bad coin turns out a good coin from circulation. Mahavir wants to save us from bias, stagnancy and rotten old-age customs. Mahavir is relevant even today and as and when Scientific tenor is developed further, his relevance will be appreciated more.
KARMAKAND OPPOSED Mahavir opposes all sorts of discrimination, snobbery and rituals (karmakand). His attempt is that man should try to learn to distinguish between essentials and non-essentials. But today the world is caught in the web of non-essentials. Sometime back, necessity was called the mother of invention. Today, the case is reverse. Invention is done first. Then for its necessity or utility a market is created through advertisement and publicity. Instead of mother's milk for the complete development of a child, this process performs the magic of bottled milk. Inflated desires and necessities do not allow us to take rest or leisure. We are caught in the web of prestige and competition or rivalry. We are in the clutches of race, caste, creed, image management and neo-feudalism and are losing ourselves. Let alone mutual respect, we are not prepared even to accommodate each other.
A new type of karmakand - fatalism, garland and bouquets, reception-arches, touching the feet, astrology, blessings, slavery, show biz and snobbery is taking the world under its claws and clutches. Telling lies and fraudulent behaviour have become our destiny. We are more interested in our own words (nij vani) rather than Mahavir's teachings (Jina vani). We pine for the publication of our photographs & the erection of our idols. If there is a group photograph of ours with family friends or even with Mahavir's idol, we will
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