Courtesy – the missing element
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I have been raised in old times I would say. When we were kids we used to get regular dosage of habit correction guidelines by our elders; like don’t walk lazily; don’t slouch on your chair; look into other person eyes when talking; say greeting (Salam) when you come into the house; treat your younger ones with care and show patience to them; treat your elders with respect and obey them; the result was these traits were embedded in our characters by the time we became adults.
Even now as a professional I feel that having these traits help me a lot, saying greetings passing a smile, accepting the mistakes of our juniors, absorbing the critique of our seniors in a healthy way and trying to improve.
How ever I personally feel that these traits are on a sharp decline. The reason may be that we have started living away from elders, the fast paced life and the evil of TV has left less time for us to listen to elders or to mentor any younger ones.
Being aloof and disoriented is becoming a fashion. Being obedient and giving time to family seems so out dated.
I rarely see people greeting or saying salam unless that have some business with you. The younger generation is very impatient with the seniors and does not treat them with the respect that they deserve for being the seniors in industry for longer amount of time. Instead they think of them as old timers working with old belief system and not believing in their vision. The seniors are similarly becoming very impatient and strict with the juniors and not remembering the time they started out.
Why is this happening? Why are we constantly fighting amongst ourselves and wasting our energies in undermining a senior or picking up on a junior? Why have we closed our minds to possibilities that a senior may have something they can offer us? Maybe they know some thing that we don’t know.
The result is that our office environments have become very tense. We can’t stand to see faces of some people. This affects our productivity — we keep on hating that person and in the process degrade the quality of work. We need to start living and actually start finding positive properties in others, and instead of stereotyping them right away we need to atleast give others a chance.
Lets start learning from each other?
We are already behind a lot of nations. In the process of becoming hitech and modern lets not forget that our values are the ones which made it possible for our elders to create a whole nation from scratch (something which i seriously doubt our generation can do)
12:52 pm
I second your thoughts Qazi. We’ve definitely rejected our cultural traits and manners. The young generation (including me) has no respect of elders or courtesy. Perhaps we’re following the international trends.
3:20 pm
skhan, if you accept it then you can correct it. I am not saying only the younger generation is to blame we as seniors have stopped coaching stopped being tolerant and have to accept half of the blame. We can look at the example of Japan, there is no nation as technologically advanced as them or busy as them, still they bow when they meet. We were once communicating with them and they use the word San synonymous to our Sahab for respect(For example Qazi-San) and never did i find any Japanese missing to write this salutation even if the addressee was an American or a Pakistani. this shows how much they believe in their values,San is a Japanese word but they don’t hesitate to use it while communicating in English. and we say Hello even when communicating with our own nationals who can understand the meaning of Asslam-o-alaikum because we think that they will say how backward we are. the need is to change the our thinking pattern and feel proud of what we have