Making Life Meaningful

The Price of Being a Taker The status of first class-citizen cannot be achieved through legislation. It can be achieved only by assuming the role of giver in society. I n the course of my several visits to the USA over a period of years, I have happened to meet Indians of both the Muslim and Hindu communities. I realized that senior members of both communities have a common concern: they fear that the future generation is rapidly losing the identity of its traditional culture. Indeed, I have seen that although families of both the communities have achieved substantial material progress, they are nevertheless unhappy. They feel strongly that their children will suffer a fate commonly known as cultural assimilation. I told the senior members of both the communities that their fear might be genuine but that their present efforts were not going to yield any positive results. What is the real problem with these generations? It is that both the communities are living in the USA as takers and not as givers. Both the communities strive to earn American dollars but they don’t try to figure as giver members of American society. In the course of a conversation, one senior Indian remarked that the