What Making My Tea Taught Me About Solving The Problems That Our Society Faces

Suddenly, the importance that tea has in my life has gone up. While working full time, I used to have a cup or two of tea during the day, more as a formality and as an excuse to spend some time away from the laptop screen.

Now, as I practice classical music more seriously, tea is playing the role of companion which soothes my tired throat. Not a surprise, I stop after practicing every two hours to make myself a cup of tea.

Tea with some ginger in it heals the sound (at least one gets that feel). So, every time I make a cup of tea, I add lots of ginger to it. In order to extract the maximum of its flavor, I boil the water for long time with minced ginger in it. This is how we are conditioned- we feel more force will give us a better flavor and extract. Still, in spite of boiling for long times, I hardly got the flavor that I wanted. So today, I thought of trying out something different. I made my tea, closed the gas and then added the ginger and covered the pot. To my surprise,  the flavor is much better than what I get with too much of boiling.

The lesson learned?

We are conditioned to think that more force, more brutality, more power is required to solve a tough problem. On the other hand, one has to understand that force and brutality kills the sensitivity; just as boiling kills the aroma of ginger.

In our society, there is cruelty, violence, hatred  and so many other problems simply because of absence of sensitivity. And what do we do to solve these problems? We use brutality; it makes people more insensitive. Isn’t our society like a boiling pot? Where everyone is just trying to add more heat? I do not expect that political parties will stop adding the heat. That completely kills their agenda and dynamites their vested interests. We, as individuals, while living in the society, can consciously make a choice of not adding more heat and preventing the sensitivity from getting killed. Many of us are disturbed by looking at what is happening around and are clueless about what to do to stop it. If you are one of them and just follow the crowd by adding more heat, you are doing more harm to the society than helping it.


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