Correspondent
Kohima, Janauray 3
The State Governor, Dr Aswhani Kumar today released a book entitled “A walk to Emmaus – A Journey of Attitudinal Change” authored by Jonas Yanthan today in Raj Bhavan.After launching the book officially, the Governor, Dr. Ashwani Kumar said it has been confirmed that attitudinal change is very difficult to bring about.
Expressing that man is man because he only can put his thoughts into work, he said the perfection of man can be seen only in the perfection of his work.
“Work is the only means by which a man can exhibit his quality. Work therefore, is a birthright and fundamental to man,” he said.
In Nagaland, he said “we also have to learn the law the Right to work”.
Maintaining that Nagaland has a lot of unemployed people, he said even in the villages people they have the statistics about unemployment and educated unemployed young people.
He however said even in the villages many of the people are underemployed.
“We need to provide good livelihood and employable environment,” he said but pointed that “we have the unemployment allowance which goes against the very concept of work”.
A man does not live by bread alone. We have to work. Even if you have all the luxuries of life, you will still need to work to have a meaningful life. Otherwise, life would not be as meaningful as it should be. Therefore work is more important than giving some unemployment allowances, which many of the government these days do.
In order to bring about attitudinal change, he felt that teaching and preaching must go together.
All our schools, colleges and universities are imparting a lot of knowledge and skills. But where are we failing? It is the values, it is the characters, it is honesty, truthfulness, sincerity. That is where we are lacking. I think we are responsible to what we are doing to our children.
We have to ensure that they have better values. Teaching and preaching, both must go together. Both Knowledge and values should go together. One cannot start teaching and preaching if one is not internally influenced. It will involve a lot of sacrifice, and it also involves lot of knowledge of philosophy and also scripture. I believe good teaching and preaching can be made possible by the schools ran by the Christians.
According to me the basic condition of teach against corruption lies in the families and number two teacher. And then comes the institution.
Apart from good parentage, good family values, and teachers, when they impart good education there are less chances that the person would be corrupted. But there after institutions have to be very very rude in implementing anti corruption measures. There should be no compromise. If these things are taken up seriously then only we can tackle corruption. We have been imparting good education, our children have been doing well, but on the employment front, they don’t want to live in Nagaland. They all want to live and work elsewhere. That is not a good situation.
Either it is because of circumstances or political reason, or economic reason. I am convinced that we are capable of doing it.
Christianity has brought a lot of goodness to Nagaland. Church has been very successful in bringing about change in the system, and is very strong in controlling corruption. We need to use Christianity for fighting corruption.
Giving the authors perspective, Jonas Yanthan, said, we live in a society where foul is fair and fair is foul and the worst is people interpret the Bible to justify even the evil deeds. We need a change in the attitude and that is why everyone talks about change with the hope of making lives better.
Therefore, he said, the onerous need is to have a proper understanding of the Bible and the religion itself. He also said that the book is an attempt to understand the Bible critically because we draw our belief primarily from it, and for this a science called hermeneutics is employed to understand the scriptural language, reality of life and what language is as a mode of communications.
