A recent news report informed us about how the Dalai Lama brought the house down during the launch of World Compassion Day where he was the chief guest.
Apparently the spiritual leader who’s known for his sense of humour “confessed” that he found it difficult sometimes to be compassionate towards a mosquito, especially when it had brought him out of deep sleep.
But was it only a joke, or could there have been a universal grain of truth in what he said?
For instance how many of us are able to hold on to any lofty ideal of compassion we may profess when we instinctively squash a mosquito which is trying to bite us? Even if we know it’s only the female which does the biting and that too because she needs the nutrients from a blood meal to nurture her eggs, do we give a damn?
Also, from a compassion point of view it’s slightly pointless to say that mosquitoes carry, say, malaria germs and therefore need to be eliminated because the truth is they pick up the parasite from infected people in the first place when they bite them.
At most the blame can now be shifted to the one-celled plasmodium parasite itself which should be the target of malaria control and not mosquitoes — just like we don’t target humans who are carriers either. But then what about compassion for plasmodium who are only trying to live?
Because at the World Compassion Day the Dalai Lama also had this to say: “Today, more than ever before, life must be characterised by a sense of universal responsibility, not only nation to nation and human to human but also human to other forms of life.”
(This piece first appeared in The Economic Times)